


Since We Have No Place to Go, Let It Snow

by Rayondeneige



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Smut, F/M, Happy Ending, Jon Snow has a Big Dick, Jonerys Advent 2020, No Refractory Period, Second Chances, Strangers to Lovers, because I said so, kind of, no gag reflex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:41:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 47,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28198572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rayondeneige/pseuds/Rayondeneige
Summary: Jon Snow decided to come back home for Christmas after three years of finding excuses, three years of trying not to hear his mother’s pleas. Back at Winterfell he found more than he was hoping for, more than family; he found the stranger he met in Dragonstone and tried to forget, with her molten hair, her blazing fire and her summer scent, like sunshine and citrus, like sunscreen and lavender.Christmas never tasted so sweet and yet felt so short.
Relationships: Commander Hotstuff/Alysanne Snow, Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen
Comments: 122
Kudos: 193





	1. All Hearts Come Home for Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from the song "Let it Snow". 
> 
> As usual, thanks to my amazing beta, Hayl for her magic with words, for the magic we have in this friendship (legit magic!). 
> 
> Thanks to Erika for her constant encouragement when I though i would never finish this monster (I was right!) and for her ideas opinions on it! She is amazing! 
> 
> There is a grey’s anatomy quote in there somewhere if you spot it! 
> 
> I was suppose to post all the chapters in one go but life and health got in the way! I'm working as fast as I could on them and they should be ready soon! 
> 
> There some Valyrian in there... fair warning I don't speak Valyrian and any mistakes are Google's fault! I put the intend translation in the End Notes. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy! comments and chat on Tumblr makes my day!

**Now**

“I’m grounding you here until the storm stops, Lieutenant,” Jon shouted over the reassuring noise of the motor and the blades turning over their heads, their speed slicing through the strong winds. He turned off the motor of the military helicopter he just landed on top of The Wall, the storm so dense around them, he wasn’t even sure he would be able to land at the correct location and not crash the plane to the ground, like a bug lost in a pile of snow. 

There was no way in Hells he would let his lieutenant flight all the way back to  _ Always Winter _ on his own. Not in this weather. Not on his watch. Not after what happened two years ago. 

“Roger that Commander.” 

The flight from the further base they had on the other side of The Wall had taken at least thrice the time it should have taken them. Jon sighed loudly, the air already forming a condensation cloud in front of his lips, reminding him they needed to move. He shouldn’t be surprised by the changing weather, by the whirlwind of ice and snow happening around them. On this side of The Wall, mother nature was a  _ fucking lunatic _ , wrapped up in blizzards, snow storms and temperature  _ way _ below zero and what should be humanly acceptable. 

As soon as he got out of the chopper, he pulled his small duffle bag over his shoulder, pulled up the hood of his black coat over his head, trying to protect himself from the outlash of nature, the tantrum of earth, the wind charged with snow like they were bullets.

The more he spent time north of The Wall, the more it felt exactly like it was designed as one of the seven Hells. 

Jon Snow was a Northman through and through. He always loved the cold, the wind, the crispiness in the air, the redness on the tip of his nose, the slippiness of the ground. After eleven years in the Night’s Watch, eleven years of not being able to feel his toes, of being incapable of feeling the heat, he just longed to go south, to get  _ warm _ again.

For a moment, he was assaulted by the memory of a house on top of a hill in Dragonstone, of moonlight hair slipping between his fingers like molten silver, of heat coming out of her full lips and skin smelling like sunshine. 

The snow and the wind brought him back to the present time, to the present cold at the end of the world, away from the heat, from the memory... from her. 

“Fucking shit,” he muttered under his breath when he finally enters the lift with Lieutnant Tollett. Whoever wished for a bloody white Christmas was a major cunt in his book. 

Jon pulled off his hood, shaking his head to get rid of the snowflakes stuck in his curls like he was his wolf coming back from the Godswood. 

He felt gross _. He really needed to wash his hair.  _

The heat of the lift, seeping from the building under them, wasn’t even getting to him, like it would take months to actually get him to feel something other than the frigid colds settling inside his bones, inside every pore of his skin. 

He would never be able to get warm again. 

He heard the tell-tale sound of the lift stopping and looked up at the lighted up numbers over the heavy door to make sure he was at the right floor. He got off the lift and stepped into the anthill that was the main floor of Castle Black, of the headquarters of the Night’s Watch preparing for what always came with the Christmas holidays; They were low on staff and high on possible storms. There were busy soldiers everywhere,multiple black dots moving as efficiently as possible.

“I knew you couldn’t survive at Always Winter for long,” said the blond man in front of him, smiling at him with his missing tooth and his blackened eye, as if Jon weren’t stationed there for the last three years. 

“What happened to your stupid face?” he asked, already knowing the answer to that. 

He already knew how he got it, how he managed to hit himself in the face with the kickback of a machine gun he was using for years now. He deserved the missing tooth and the black eye for acting like a fucking rookie, nothing more than a first-year recruit. And everyone knew everything about everyone in the Night’s Watch. There were absolutely no personal boundaries. Jon learned the hard way that gossip tends to run faster than the wind here. He didn’t even get to put his dick back in his pants before all his rangers knew of his little romp in the sheets with one of the recruits. 

It was a bad decision that no one would let him live down. 

Everybody knew about everyone's businesses. It was just so damn annoying. 

“This?” Grenn asked, grinning, pointing at his face like Jon could talk about anything other than that. “It was just a miscalculation.”

Jon huffed a breath at him, shaking his head. Grenn was one of those guys that never really grew up or left the teenager behind. He never killed the boy to let the man be born. The military didn’t help with the attitude, with the cockiness and the overall childish behaviour. If five years in the most difficult branch of Westeros' military services didn’t help him, absolutely nothing would. 

“Are you sure you want to drive down to Winterfell tonight  _ Commander _ ? The weather is shit.” 

Jon chose to ignore the snickering, the tone of amusement Grenn always had when he was referring to his military rank, like a real fucking child. 

There were only a handful of scenarios in which he liked being called Commander outside of official business and Grenn was in absolutely none of them. 

“I missed the last three Christmases,” Jon started, moving his tongue against his teeth. He hadn’t gone back for Christmas since he was stationed at Always Winter, since he was so far up north he always had an excuse not to go back to Winterfell. 

“You were supposed to miss this one too,” Grenn remarked, walking with him, remembering the meeting they had a couple months ago in which Jon didn’t even bother asking for some time off. He loved his family, he loved Christmas… he just never really wanted to talk about the job, about the danger, about the worries in his mother's eyes, and the way she was always asking him to quit, to come back home. He stopped going home for Christmas because it was too much for him to disappoint all of them at the same time and be there to witness it. 

“Yes… but then, my mother called, crying,” he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose at the memory. 

She tried to protect him from it, to make him believed it was alright, to convince him she was satisfied with his siblings all coming home, with her table being  _ almost  _ full, but there was something he could hear in the sharp intake of breath she took, in the skip of her voice when she mumbled her “ _ almost,” _ like it was the most heartbreaking word she ever had to say. There was something in the way she reminded him she chose him, and she would like for him to choose her too… just once. 

The guilt trip only a mother could make you take. 

“Ouch!” Grenn simply said with a grimace, understanding  _ exactly  _ what it meant for him to receive that call. “Tomorrow is only Christmas Eve tho,” he said, trying to convince him he wouldn’t miss Christmas, convince him he should stay at the base and avoid the road in those conditions. 

He couldn’t. Christmas was  _ infinite  _ in the Stark household. It had already started. 

“I already missed the first night of Christmas Grenn. I can’t miss the rest,” he said, walking through the garage to find his Range Rover in the long-term parking section, waiting for him. 

“Surprise mom! I died for Christmas,” Grenn said with a lower voice than usual, that was supposed to sound like Jon but didn’t even come close to it. 

“At least she’ll know I tried to surprise them,” he deadpanned, throwing his bag in the back seat of the car, ready to leave, ready to start the long way home. 

“Fine,” Grenn huffed, in a tone leaving no doubt he didn’t agree with his decision to leave right away, “you’re the Commander.” 

“Have a Merry Christmas Grenn,” Jon said, squeezing his shoulder before climbing into his car, not really waiting for his friend's response. He just wanted to get home already. 

He looked down at his phone, smiling at the 43 messages he had, just knowing they were all from Sansa. She was mad at him. As opposed to Arya, Sansa was always  _ really  _ open with her emotions, especially when it was the time to rip him a new one, to tell him how insufferable he was. 

He rapidly went through his messages, smiling at the pictures she sent him of all the things he was missing, of all the gingerbread he wouldn't be able to eat, alluding to that time he made himself sick when they were kids, eating his weight in Christmas cookies. 

Arya was in one of the pictures, flipping him the bird, not talking to him at this moment. She was the exact opposite of her sister for that, and for  _ everything _ else really. She was giving him the silent treatment while Sansa was bombarding him with disappointed messages. Arya knew him better than anyone, she knew that her silence would hurt him more than any words she could say to him. She would get over it eventually. Last year she ignored him until mid-January… it was the longest she ever went without talking to him. 

He smiled, quickly saving the picture. 

_ He missed them. _

___

Jon arrived at the gate of Winterfell in the middle of the night, the old castle looked abandoned with all the lights off, like a haunted house. There was always something scary at seeing the house in the dark, at imagining all the lives that were lost for it in the past, all the lives that lay to rest underneath it in the crypt. 

When he first moved here when he was four, he couldn’t even sleep at night, wondering when the ghosts of the past generations would get him, when would they hunt him down like the Stark he wasn’t. It broke his mother’s heart, and just like that, tucked between her and his dad, he could finally sleep, knowing no one would come and chase him out of the house. 

It was still scary as fuck. 

He entered the code at the gate and smiled. They never changed that code, the whole town could get inside at this point, the code was obsolete and completely useless, but their mother thought it was sentimental or some other nonsense like this. 

He turned off the engine, got out of the car the most quietly he could master, not wanting to wake anyone up at this point, he would surprise them in the morning, after a good shower and a respectable amount of sleep. Inside the house, he lit up his path to his room, stopping in the kitchen to steal some of the gingerbread cookies. He made sure to steal the best ones, the most beautifully decorated, knowing they were Sansa’s, knowing she would go batshit crazy on his ass. 

He snickered to himself, biting the head off one of the cookies and sending her a picture of the mutilated pastry, of her work going to waste, of all the things she tried to punish him with. He even sent a picture of his face, his mouth full of cookies, mischief in his eyes, incapable of resisting pissing her off.

He struggled with his bag, trying to open the door of his room. It smelled like burning wood and his eyes immediately went to the hearth, ember still burning away, glowing, casting red and orange light in the room. He was surprised his dad would still light a fire in this room, knowing that he wasn’t coming back for Christmas. 

The fire was almost out at this hour of the night, there was the smallest amount of golden light in the room, just enough for him to put his bag on the dresser and see that his bed was already unmade on his side, the sheet rumpled, stuck under the heavy headboard. He didn’t even have the time to form a question, to think of something before he felt a sharp pain at the back of his head, like an explosion, like something just fell on his head, like someone just hit him with a rock. 

“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, his vision getting blurry and full of dark spots. He immediately brought his hand to the back of his head, not sure if he actually felt blood or if it was just the nastiness of his hair sticking on his fingers. With his other hand he tried to find his balance against the wall, searching for the light switch, trying to understand  _ what the fuck was going on.  _

Someone hit him again on the shoulder. Hard. He grunted and turned around too fast, the dizziness assaulting all his senses, making him feel like Bambi stepping on ice. With all his training, he should have known someone was in the room, he should have added up all the clues, the fire and the bed. He felt fucking ridiculous. 

“Oh my Gods, Commander!?” someone exclaimed in front of him, dropping something on the floor. He felt like he was submerged in water, like he was in a fishbowl and someone was screaming at him but all he could hear was half the words. Even underwater, even in a fishbowl and with a throbbing head, he was certain he could pick this particular voice out of a thousand sounds, in the most crowded space and in the most deafening silence. He could recognize the Essosi timbre of her voice around the end of her sentence, around the edge of her words. 

He tried to find her in the low light, to find her around the black dots intruding his vision, big enough to make everything seem black. He was probably imagining her, torturing himself with her, with the regrets and all the missed opportunities, with all the reasons he had to brood over her.

His legs buckled under him and he sat on the floor - _ crashed _ \- on the floor with all the finesse he could master. 

“ _ Udrāzmio! iksan sīr vaoreznuni. _ ”

He didn’t understand anything, but he smiled, a big toothy grin while two small hands closed around his face, hot as ember. That. That, he couldn’t imagine, he wasn’t good enough for that, good enough to form words that resemble High Valyrian. He wasn’t imagining the hot hands, or the strands of silver hair dancing in front of his eyes among the blackness, brightening everything.

“Alysanne Snow?” he asked even if he was absolutely certain it was her with her warmth seeping into his face and her summer smell, like sunshine and citrus, like sunscreen and lavender, like  _ her.  _

She snorted at the name, at the joke only she could get, or maybe at him for remembering it. 

_ He remembered everything about her, everything about Daenerys-With-No-Last-Name.  _

__

Her hands were reaching around his face, her fingers in his hair and he winced when she found his wound, when she touched the nastiness that was his hair. 

“You shouldn’t,” he told her, “it’s gross.” 

“Yes, I can smell that,” she answered. He could hear the smile in her voice. 

She kept searching through his hair, touching his scalp, welding her finger with his hair, shifting besides him to see better. He never regretted anything more than not washing his hair for so many days… except maybe that time he took a plane from Dragonstone to The Gift without her full name, without her number. 

“You’re not bleeding,” she said softly, bringing her hands back to her knees. 

_ Great. That meant he was just nasty as fuck.  _

“Are you in trouble,  _ Udrāzmio _ ?” she asked beside him, knowing exactly what that name was doing to him. He looked back at her in the corner of his eyes, the black spots subsiding, letting him see her pink lips turned in a beautiful smile full of secrets, full of promises he wanted her to say again, even if it was a lie. 

“Why?” he asked, his brows knitted together, not understanding. 

She was down on her knees beside him, sitting on her heels, miles of legs on display by the pajama pants she  _ wasn’t _ wearing. “Breaking and entering in people’s houses,” she said, pushing one of his curls behind his ear with a soft touch. 

He closed his eyes and softly laughed, “It’s my childhood home, Daenerys,” he said, “it’s actually my room.” 

“Really?” she asked in a sharp intake of breath, dropping her hand on her leg again, looking around them at the room and the soft masculine touch in here, the dark colours that always suited him better than anything else. “But you’re a…” she stopped herself before she could continue that line of thoughts, but he knew what she was going to say anyway. 

“Snow. I’m a Snow,” he finished for her. It was true, he was a Snow. He wasn’t a Stark in name, but he was in everything that mattered, in everything that meant he had a family. “I wanted to keep the stigmatization and overall bad reputation of the name,” he said, not going into the real reason, into the fact that his parents offered him a choice years ago and he chose Snow in the hope that his biological mother would look for him one day. “I do love a good fight.” 

She looked at him with a soft look she had  _ no business  _ to put on him, like she knew it wasn’t the truth but let it slide anyway. He wished he was able to turn on the lights earlier, just so he could see the violet of her eyes, the speks of lilac in them. He was about to say something else, something more when his eyes caught something on the floor beside her. 

“Did you hit me with a fucking  **_snow_ ** globe?” he asked with a rough voice, not believing that was what happened. 

“Yeah…” she answered looking down at her hands. “It’s kind of poetic, isn’t it?” she said, picking up the Snow globe Arya got him when she was in fifth grade. It was the stepping stone they used as an excuse to start their tradition, to start giving each other the worst gift they could find in Wintertown. This one was special to him anyway, it was tacky and horrible, but it was one of the most precious things he ever received in his life. 

“Hurtful,” he answered, his hand going to the back of his head, gently massaging the ever-growing bump there. 

“I’m sorry  _ Udrāzmio…”  _ she said, her voice enveloping him with each word. “I was scared,” she simply offered, not as an excuse but as reasoning, as a way to explain why he received a snow globe on the head, why he was still dizzy on the floor of his room with a woman he last saw on the other side of the country. “Plus,” she added, “apparently  _ every single person  _ knows the code for the gate.” 

He huffed a laugh at that, at the useless gate they still lock and the fucking code everyone knew. Then, he furrowed his brows, trying to put everything together, having the feeling he was missing the most important piece of the puzzle, knowing he didn’t even know what that puzzle was supposed to look like. “What are  _ you  _ doing here?” he asked, taking her hand in his to assure her he wasn’t vindictive about her presence, to assure her he wasn’t mad about it,  _ not at all to feel the heat consume his rough palm.  _

She smiled at him, her white teeth the most visible thing in the room. She sat down completely in front of him, bending her knees, her infinite legs against his, burning his pants, seering them to his skin. “Sansa invited me,” she said, their joint hands on her knee, her other hand grazing her face and the shadows on her neck. 

“Sansa?” he asked, dumbfounded. She looked at him, worries automatically swimming in her eyes, her gaze searching on his face for a wince, a grimace, anything that could indicate he was in pain, that could indicate he was losing it. “I know who my sister is,” he fastly reassured her, she didn’t knock his family out of his mind, “I didn’t know you knew each other.” 

“She’s one of my best friends,” she said with a tender smile, “we work together.” 

“She never told me that,” he said, hurt in his voice. It would have been so much simpler if she could have just mentioned her, alluded to the fact she knew her. 

Daenerys laughed beside him, a bell-like laugh that reminded him of the soft waves crashing around the cliffside of Dragonstone. “Commander,” she started, her hand slipping against his cheek to make him turn his head and look at her, “how would you know she was talking about me?” 

He wouldn’t.

She was a stranger. The woman in front of him, with all the familiarity, with all the memory she was bringing with her was a stranger, she asked to stay a stranger to him. No name… no disappointment. 

Even if he remembered her smell, the way she tasted after a glass of whisky and the way she tasted in the morning, the softness of her skin and the heat of her legs caging him against her… she was a stranger. 

A stunning one. 

“You’re right,” he acknowledged in a sigh, trying to remember every time Sansa talked about her friend, about her work, about anything that could resemble something about Daenerys. He came up with nothing, he wouldn’t know if Sansa were talking about her or someone else. “Strangers.” 

“Strangers,” she acquiesced, the last cracking of the embers almost stealing her words from him, the longing in them, the notes of almost sadness. 

They looked at each other in silence for a while, neither of them uttering a word, as if talking could suddenly disturb the moment, make her disappear again in smoke, in the golden ray of morning, in the early hours of the day. She wrapped her arms around her leg, her cheek on her knee, her hair cascading down her leg, the tips of it almost touching the wooden floor, never breaking their gaze. She was breathtaking, like a mirage, like a snow globe induced hallucination. 

“I need a shower,” he blurted out, thinking of his hair again, of the two days he spent training in the land outside of Always Winter. 

“Yes, you do,” she said, laughing again, “Where’s your wit tonight, Commander? You’re very slow.” She sounded amused, teasing, sliding in a safe banter, in their usual way of communication. 

It was his turn to smile, to let her keep the unsaid between them, to let her get away with the things she wasn’t saying. “I’m afraid, Miss Snow, that you knocked it out of me with a snow globe,” he answered, making her groan and hide her face in the crook of her elbow, embarrassed. 

“I thought you were an intruder!” she mumbled, still not looking at him. 

“In my own room,” he countered. 

“Like I knew it was your room.” 

“Why did you choose this one?” he asked, curious. She looked at him, her violet eyes the only thing he could see over her arms. 

She looked at him for a while, for what felt like ages, looking for her words, looking for a way to conjure them to form an acceptable answer. “It felt safe somehow,” she finally said, her hand going to the shadow on her cheek again. 

_ It felt safe.  _

His heart was roaming inside his chest, beating against his rib cage like it wanted to say something words couldn’t say correctly, to escape, to reach her and cup that cheek she kept touching.

“I’ll change room,” she said, putting her hands to the ground to help herself get up. He wanted to ask her to stay, to ask her to do the thing she didn’t let him do, to keep this just a little bit longer. “Tomorrow,” she added like she could read his mind, “tonight I’ll stay here, because you may have a concussion.” 

“I probably do,” he said, jumping on her reasoning, grasping at any reason to keep her for a little bit longer, holding on to the suggestive rise of her eyebrow and the corner of her lips. 

“Go on then,” she said, turning around, offering him the unforgettable view of her ass peeking under the black shirt she was wearing. She looked at him over her shoulder, smirking when he didn’t meet her eyes right away.  _ Busted.  _ “get to this shower, Commander Hotstuff,” 

He closed his eyes. 

_ He was fucked.  _

___

“I’m quite disappointed in you, Commander,” Daenerys said as soon as he got out of the bathroom, scrubbed clean, his wet hair dripping on his t-shirt. 

He looked around the room to find her, finally locking eyes with her, in his bed, her back against the headboard, her face lit by the light stand she had turned on, waiting for him. 

_ She waited for him. _

“Why?” he asked, running a towel over his hair, drying it as much as he could, still looking at her, at her pouty lips. 

“I gave you  _ all _ the legs,” she said, gesturing toward where her legs laid under the heavy duvet, “even a peek at my ass, and you’re hiding the abs?” She clicked her tongue at him, running it against her teeth, pouting, like he committed a crime. “And the ass,” she added as if it was an afterthought, as if she just remembered it.  _ Rude.  _

He guffawed a laugh at that, at her face, at the way her lips were turning downright, like a child asking for a candy in a store. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, still laughing, dropping his wet towel in the hanger by the door before walking to the bed, to the side of the bed she stole, to the knowing eyes she kept on him, like she just knew it was his side of the bed, like she just waited there to mess with him, to mess with his head more than she already did with that fucking snow globe. “You’re on my side, Miss Snow,” he told her in a low voice as soon as his thighs hit the mattress.

She looked up at him under her lashes, her violet eyes finally visible to him and he had to take a minute to be able to think with anything other than his dick when she was giving him that look. Lost in his head -the lower one-, he didn’t even feel her move her legs from under the cover before they were on either side of him. She was running her feet against his calf, a fire trail of spark and ember, a flaming path of wants and needs. 

“And  _ you _ are still hiding the abs,” she huskily said, her hands on the hem of his shirt, sucking her bottom lip in her mouth and sinking her teeth in it. 

He grunted, closing his eyes as he reached over his head to grab his shirt and pull it to yank it off. “Better?” he asked with a voice so rough, he never heard his northern accent being so strong in a single word before this. 

She nodded, applying pressure on the back of his thighs with her feet, hitching up the creamy expense of her legs around his waist. There was never any doubt about what she wanted, about what she was asking from him because he had the feeling she always knew exactly what she needed and never shied away from chasing it. 

He crawled over her, hiking her up the bed a little, enjoying the sound that came out of her throat, rumbling across her entire body. He was close enough to smell her, to smell everything he remembered, to smell the sunshine and the citrus, the sunscreen and the lavender, and something else entirely… like fire. She kept her fingers against his abdomen, running from muscle to muscle, claiming every inch of him, one by one. 

All his weight was on one of his arms, keeping him from crushing her tiny body between him and the bed, keeping him from taking every part of her as his own. His mouth was hovering over her skin, his breath making it break in a thousand goosebumps. He was about to lick his way from her collarbone to her mouth when he froze, one hand going to her cheek, the other one holding himself up. Her breath hitches up her throat, almost choking her, her nails bluntly tried to grip at his side. She knew what he just saw. 

He turned her face to see the fading bruise on her cheek better and the fading bruise forming an ugly shadow around her neck... to see what he missed before in the dimmed lights of the remnant fire. “What happened?” he asked softly, ignoring the simmering anger he felt mixing with the desire, diluting it with a different need, with the need to protect at all cost. He tried to crush the feeling, knowing it was unnecessary, tried to keep the cool demeanour he always had, masking the grit of his teeth, masking the shaking of his arm forcing himself to unfist the sheet on the side of her face. 

She put her hand on the one holding her chin and gently pushed it down to look back at him, so close he could feel her breath against his skin, so close their nose almost brushed. “Nothing I didn’t handle,” she whispered, her purple eyes holding his gaze, bearing it all like she had absolutely nothing to hide. “An angry ex-fiancé with a new criminal charge against him,” she stated coldly, almost surgically, like reaping a bandaid. 

She unhooked her legs from around him and the mood shifted, the flames between them burning with a different colour, the same heat, but in a different place, brewing calmly, but with the same devastation. 

“I can hunt him down if you want…” he offered, his thumb running along her jaw, the hand beside her head lost in the moonlight of her hair. He offered, but he was sure Daenerys knew exactly how to handle herself, he offered because he was angry, because he could feel that simmering rage inside his chest coming back to life at the idea of someone putting their hands on her to hurt her, of someone _ just _ putting their hands on her. 

She huffed a laugh against his skin. “Sansa already offered the services of her military brother, assuring me he could make him disappear where the sun never shines,” she said, leaning her face against his hand, “I was too scared to ask where that might be.”

“I’m guessing she meant for me to kill him and bury him in the ground somewhere north of the wall,” he deadpanned, making her laugh again. 

“You can’t even defend yourself against a snow globe,” she reminded him, making fun of him, making him smile again. 

She brought her arms around his neck and pulled him down until his arm gave out, until his weight was finally all on her, until his arm went under her to pull her even more against him, his hand cupping the back of her neck, until he could smell nothing else than sunshine and citrus, than sunscreen and lavender, than  _ her.  _

“I’m fine, Jon,” she whispered in his ear, her fingers lost in his wet hair. He hated the fact that she felt the need to reassure him about it, that she needed to comfort him. But he loved that she said his name.

_ She said his name. _

“Are you?” he asked anyway, his lips against her pulse, feeling it jump faster. 

“Aye,” she said, mocking him again, “I am now.” Her fingers were still weaving in his hair, her nails grazing his scalp. He winced when she went over the bump at the back of his head, sending a shock wave to the base of his spine. “But you’re not.” 

“I’m fine,” he said petulantly, sounding like a child even to his own ears. He wanted to be fine and just  _ be  _ with her. He wanted to just take it where they left it and take the gift of her, appreciated the fact she was here and he thought he would never see her again. That was the deal after all. 

_ Strangers _ . 

She pushed down harder on his bump, making him see black dots again, making him grunt in pain. “You’re not,” she softly said, gently petting his hair, carefully avoiding the back of his head. “You need to rest.” She tried to move, to get them situated better on the bed, but he grunted in her hair, puffing hot air against her neck, pushing his nose farther in her nest, feeling her laugh more than he could hear it. 

She was right, he knew she was right. He needed the rest even before she attacked him with a Christmas ornament, even before he left Always Winter. His body was tired, almost as much as his mind, restless, overflowing with the need to escape anywhere but north again. He ran his beard on the side of her face before letting go, before pushing himself off of her, freeing her of his weight, of his cold embrace. 

He looked down at her and pouted. She looked magnificent under him, her silver hair fanned across the dark sheets of his bed, like a full moon, like a night sky full of stars. Her shirt bunched up at her waist, exposing her navel and her underwear, full of promises he couldn’t fulfill. 

She pushed herself up the bed and under the cover quickly, too quickly for him to follow. He wanted to find her again, get lost in her, forget where he began and where she ended and register as many details about her as he could. He wanted to know  _ more _ . She patted his side of the bed, a silent invitation, a gentle confirmation that she wouldn’t back down, that she’d force him to rest. She turned off the lamp as soon as he went under the covers with her, automatically bringing her to him, caging her in his arms. 

“I’ll wake you up every two hours or so to make sure I didn’t do too much damage to your pretty head,” she whispered as she situated herself on top of him, one leg smoothly sliding between his, one hand travelling from his chest to his jaw, resting on his pulse point. 

Jon turned his face to kiss her hand, to finally feel her hot and smooth skin against his lips, “You should make it up to me,” he said. A hopeful suggestion, laced in desire and a small amount of disappointment for his head, for his mind and for his body shutting him down. 

“ _ Kesan mazverdagon ziry bē naejot ao, Udrāzmio _ ,” she answered. Her voice was deep, her tongue rolling around every sound like it was a sinful song punctuated by the smallest roll of her hip. He had no idea what she said, but it sounded dirty, wicked, almost filthy. He didn’t want to ask because he wanted to live with the silent oath that it meant something more for her too. 

“Goodnight, Jon,” she murmured, with the same sinful voice, proving he was probably hearing what he wanted to hear, the way he wanted to hear it anyway. The sins were in her voice, in her mouth dripping out of her lips and embracing the way she said his name, a foreign word, a step too far for just strangers. 

His hand travelled on her back, following the curve of her spine, the path leading to her ass, leading to the black lace barrier he didn’t trespass, still exploring under her shirt, brushing over every expense of skin he could find under his palm. “Goodnight, Daenerys,” he answered, trying to put the same amount of heat in his words. 

“It’s Dany,” she murmured again, almost inaudible. 

His hands stopped their movement, stopped their exploration of her skin, of the planes and curves of her body. “Oh my god, did you give me a fake name?” he asked, uncertain, feeling her laugh under his fingers. 

“No!” She exclaimed, putting her chin on his chest to look at him, a puff of air travelling to his neck with the rhythm of her laugh, “but my friends calls me Dany.”

There was no going back for him, there was no way he could go back and keep being the stranger she asked him to be, let her stay just a girl in a bar. “I don’t really want to be your friend, Daenerys,” he told her, his voice heavy with heat, not hiding his intentions. He didn’t want to stay just strangers, but he never wanted to be her friend either. 

They were past that point, between the bar, the one-night stand, the morning after and the snow globe. 

She smiled at him, a small lift of her lips. She understood. “It’s your loss,” she said, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue, “I’m a great friend.” And he had no doubt about it, there was nothing he knew about her that would make her anything but the perfect friend. That just wasn’t what he wanted from her, what he imagined for the last weeks. “Time for strangers is over hum?” She said, apparently arriving at the same conclusion as him, observing the same line, realizing they crossed it at some unidentified point in time. 

He was pretty sure he crossed that line at Dragonstone, in the morning light of a foggy day, “Aye.” There was no way of denying it anyway. He crossed the line she had drawn on the sand. 

“I’m glad,” she said, surprising him. It was her plan altogether, her way of setting the boundaries. 

“You are?” He couldn’t resist asking, incapable of hiding the surprise in his voice, remembering his last attempts of convincing her they  _ shouldn’t  _ stay strangers anymore. 

She nodded against him, putting her cheek back on his chest and somehow, it was louder than words. “Sleep now,  _ Udrāzmio _ ” 

The last thing he thought before he fell asleep was that he was wrong; it didn’t take months for him to feel warm, it only took minutes of  _ her.  _

He felt warm. 

___

**Then**

This day was a fucking mess. This whole fucking week was a mess. 

They were in windy Dragonstone to close a deal for the benefit of the Night’s Watch about dragon glass. They needed the dragon glass to expand the Always Winter military base, and the rare glass was the only material that could be resistant enough to the harsh cold of winter to build the foundation. They were out of it everywhere except this island niche in the middle of the black sea. 

Jon was here to convince them to let them take it, to let the Night’s Watch mine it, and he wasn’t even convinced it was a good idea to send the last bit of this natural resource to the edge of the world, at the place almost nobody goes anymore. Not when it could be useful anywhere else, not when it could be used for a greater purpose. 

He was here to sell something he didn’t believe in. And it showed.

“Change your fucking face,” Edd grumbled beside him, annoyed with him since the beginning of the week, since he realized that maybe Commander Snow was not the right person for this job. “Brooding is a good look on you, and it pisses me off,” his friend added under his breath, pushing him out of the car in front of their hotel, Samwell Tarly snickering behind them. 

Jon huffed a breath in Edd's direction, laughing. His sulking nature and brooding temperament were the laughing stock of everyone when they were recruits, fresh ass babies in the Night’s Watch. Jon Snow was known as the sulky bastard of the North. He didn’t mind most of the time. It was second nature to him, like getting up in the morning and going for a run, like breathing the crisp winter air… nothing like the humid shit they were breathing here. 

“Fuck off Edd,” he said with a laugh, looking at the revolving door of the hotel, wanting anything other than going back there, to a tiny room with dust bunnies in corners, flaking paint and scratchy sheets. There was actually not a force in the world strong enough to make him go up there at this point. He needed a longer break. He needed an escape. “I’m going out for a drink,” he said, rooted in the pavement, feeling constricted at the idea of going in, feeling trapped like Ghost every time he had to go in the car. 

“We’ll come with you,” Edd said, dragging Sam in his decisions. 

Jon had to give everything he had not to sigh.  _ Here goes nothing.  _ He wanted to be alone, to dwell on his day, on this particular mission, on the last three years that seemed to take him absolutely nowhere and on every life decisions he took in his life. He wanted to be alone. He just nodded, not having it in him to say that to Edd or to Sam, even if he knew by his protest that Sam had no desire to end his night in a bar in a shady side of Dragonstone. 

Jon started the walk toward the bar he spotted four days ago, the neon lights on top of the door had a couple missing lights, some others were blinking, while the door was covered in different beer stickers from every place he could name across the country. 

This was a hole in a wall. 

This was his kind of establishment. 

As soon as his eyes adjusted to the dim lights inside the bar, he could see the different people at the tables, the different people lining the bar… and  _ her _ . 

She looked out of place in a way he couldn’t actually describe, like a flower growing directly on the wall, like a snowfall in the desert or like the calm before a storm. A shimmering ball gown in a bar, a halo of molten silver hair cascading down a pale and naked back, a glass of golden whisky she was mixing with the tip of her finger, something so alluring he couldn’t look away. 

There was nothing about her that was familiar, comforting, or like the women he usually go for, like the type of women he used to be attracted to. Wild. Untamed… Inconsiderate. 

This woman looked polished, beautiful, perfect, almost like a dream. 

_ She looked lonely.  _

“Come on man! You said you wanted to grab a drink,” Edd shouted at him, following his eyes, hitting him with the back of his hand, knowing exactly what Jon was about to do. 

“I never said I want to have a drink with  _ you, _ ” he cheekily said, a smirk on his lips. He raised his shoulder and ignored his friend to make his way to the bar, toward the long silver waves and the lonely figure. 

He took the seat right beside her, her body emanated so much heat he could feel it through his pants, the touch of the sun of a dornish beach, the touch of the flame of a dragon. She looked at him over the edge of her glass, the amber liquid reflecting on her violet eyes, making them look haunted, inhuman, almost celestial. Her red lips were printed on the edge, staining the glass with what only could feel like a promise. 

She raised an eyebrow at him, he saw her eyes roamed over the uniform, over the black on black strips on his shoulder, over the name tag on his chest. “What can I do for you Commander?” it was flat. Impersonal. Not interested despite the way her eyes kept travelling over his body. 

“We could start with a story,” he said calmly, every word wrapped in the burr of his Northern accent, “and a name.” 

He surprised her. He could tell by the sudden spark in her eyes, by her full lips opening without a sound, by the inch she took back between them, and by the sudden stillness of her fingers over her drink. He could tell it was a  _ good  _ surprise by the smile playing at the corner of her lips, a smile she was trying to hide, but didn’t quite manage to perfectly conceal. “I don’t have a story,” she said, going back to her drink, looking at him over her shoulder, “I’m just a girl in a bar.” 

Something told him she was never just a girl in a bar, she was never so ordinary for anyone to refer to her as just that. 

“Why do I doubt it?” he asked, getting closer, catching a wisp of sunshine and citrus, of sunscreen and lavender, like she managed to bottle the exact scent of a summer breeze. 

“I don’t know,” she mumbled against the glass of her drink, “maybe you’re just insightful,  _ Udrāzmio _ .” 

Her last word caught in his own throat, like he was the one playing with the valyrian word, like he was the one dancing with the sound of it.  _ He had no fucking idea what it meant, but it went straight to his dick.  _

She must have seen the confusion in his face, in the way he looked blankly at her, “ _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she repeated,” it means Commander.” She specified, tracing the black strip on his shoulder with the tip of her finger, counting them, making them seered themselves in his shirt. 

He was certain he never wanted anything more than to hear that word dancing out of her lips again, in every possible way, in every possible tone. He was about to tell her his name, to tell her something, anything, but she stopped him, a tiny hand on the skin of his forearm. 

“Don’t,” she whispered, playing with the hem of his rolled-up sleeves, “let’s just stay strangers.” There was a soft plea in her voice, like asking for it was different from her mouth than his, like asking to remain anonymous was a privilege she wasn’t used to have, like it was actually a blessing. “That way you will never be disappointed by my obvious daddy issues and the way I always put my job before anything else,” she said, her eyes on him, like she was holding the ultimate truth of life, like she just knew. “And I won’t be disappointed by your repeated absence, your commitment issue and your fuckboy tendencies,” she said with impudence, her tongue in her cheek to keep herself from smiling at him, at his amusement, at his own smile wavering every time her nails grazed his skin. 

By the look of it, she knew exactly what she was doing. 

He nodded. “This sounds like a tragic love story,” he said, taking her glass from her other hand, taking a sip, never leaving her eyes, locking his lips on the edge of her glass, on the print of her lips. 

“The worst,” she admitted, clicking her tongue against her teeth, “the workaholic girl next door and the fuckboy with a saviour complex.” She sighed dramatically, taking her drink back and slowly dragging her lips over where his lips just touch. “It ends in ugly tears.” 

He smiled at that, looking down at the bar, shaking his head, “What makes you think I’m a fuckboy?” 

She laughed loudly, forcing him to look back at her to see her raise her eyebrows, mirth in her eyes. “You enter a bar in a military uniform,” she pointed out, looking at him, gently tapping his forearm, “with rolled-up sleeves, knowing exactly what it does to women, hitting on me less than two minutes after you walked in.” 

“Is it really a thing?” he asked, scrunching his nose, his eyes travelling between the rolled-up sleeves and her eyes. 

“Oh yes,” she nodded with emphasis. 

“I may be wearing my uniform… but  _ you _ are wearing a ball gown in a bar,” he argued, his eyes roaming down the intricate dress she was wearing, the sheer long sleeves and bodice full of strategically placed red embroidery and sequins. 

"Irrelevant,” she said, moving her hand in the air, pushing the argument with the back of it. “I escaped a Christmas party,” she said as an explanation, as the only explanation she’ll give him about the red dress.

It would remain a mystery. Like her name. 

“You’re thinking too loud. Are you still hung up about the fuckboy comment?” she asked knowingly, looking at him, trying to understand his silence. 

He laughed. “No,” he said. He  _ wasn’t. _ “I’m thinking about how you could never be described as a girl next door to me,” he answered, getting closer to her, so close to the flames, he could burn himself down and ask for more if he weren’t careful. 

“Smooth.” 

“I am known to be a smooth motherfucker,” he lied, an arm across the back of her stool, his fingers almost touching her, hovering over the waves of her hair and the skin of her back, “a bloody poet.” 

She smiled at that, turning toward him, her hair cascading in front of her shoulder with the movement. “What can I offer you,  _ Udrāzmio _ ?” she asked, tapping her glass with her finger, asking for a refill of the whisky he just finished. 

“I’ll take anything you're willing to give, to be honest,” he dared to say, his northern voice dripping with heat, his eyes never leaving hers. 

“Bold. Direct,” she stated, reclining against the back of her stool, pushing her skin on his hand, “I like it.” Her voice was more than heat. It was like wildfire and lava, like trying to breathe in the sun and breathe out ashes. 

“What will I call you if you want us to stay strangers?” he asked.

She leaned in toward him, a breath away from a kiss. “You can call me by your name,” she whispered, tracing the Snow embroidered on his chest, over his heart. 

“I’m afraid it won’t suit you,” he said. She was too hot, laced in flames and embers. 

She looked at him from the tip of his raven curls to his waist before coming back to his eyes, lifting an eyebrow, “like it suits you, Commander Hotstuff?” 

“Point taken,” he laughed, his nose bumping against hers, neither of them breaking the small space between them. 

“What would suit me then?” It was guttural, so low he could barely decipher the sound over the ambient noise in the bar, over his friends he could still hear nearby. 

“Something unique, alluring, intriguing and sweet somehow,” he started, lifting a finger at every point, laughing when she distastefully wrinkled up her nose at the last one. “… Alysanne?” 

“Alysanne Snow?” she tried out, feeling the name in her mouth, playing with it. 

“Or I may just call you  _ love _ ,” he said, not sure if she liked it. 

“What would you be most comfortable moaning later, Commander?” she boldly asked, her breath mingling with his, her lips grazing his. 

It was all he needed to stand up and bring her to him, his cold hand on her back, playing with the tips of her hair, moving up to the nape of her neck, to taste the whisky on her lips. He explored her mouth, absorbed her moan, bringing her to the edge of her stool, against his body, cursing the dress in the way. 

He detached his lips from hers, rolling his forehead on hers, smiling at the small smudge of lipstick under her bottom lips. “I would be comfortable moaning both,” he assured with a hoarse voice. 

“Let’s see which one comes out first,” she said. She smiled, downing her glass without a word, wincing at the burn before taking his hand to move out of there. 

He didn’t spare any thought to Edd and Sam, following her. 

**___**

The taxi drive was short, full of tongue and lips, of fingers trying to find each other, of breathing nonsense... full of them. He paused at the wind outside her house, at the sound of waves crashing against the cliff, at the feeling it was as stormy as her, a reflection of something brewing in her guts. 

They didn’t pause for anything other than that, for anything other than her finding the way to unlock the door with his mouth locked on her neck and them almost tripping on the stairs on their way to her bedroom with floor to ceiling windows and gauzy curtains. He watched her take careful steps across the room to look out the windows, down the cliff, down the darkness of it all. 

But he turned the lights on to look at her, blacking out the view. He didn’t come here for darkness or for the view of a fucking cliff. He came here for her, for the girl in a bar, the stranger with silver hair and creamy skin. 

She turned toward him just in time for him to crash against her, to bring her lips to his, breathing her in, eating her up until he couldn’t anymore, until his lungs constricted in his chest. He took his time to look at her, to register her full lips gorged with their last kiss, her lipstick smudged around her mouth, making her look sinful, making him want to ravage her mouth until there was no pigment left on her lips, until there was only him. 

She opened her heavy lids to look back at him, a predatory look on her eyes he was sure he was reflecting at her. He was like a wolf looking at its prey, realizing too late she was as predatory as him.  _ A dragon _ . 

He took a step toward her even if there was almost no space between them, even if it brought him toe to toe with her heels shoes, even if it brought him in the skirt of her scarlet dress, making it chimes like music. The only music he wanted it to make was the sound of it pooling at her feet on the ground, revealing nothing but  _ her _ . 

Jon let his fingers dance on her cheek, to her jaw, around her neck, under the hem of her dress, catching every grain of texture in her skin, every hitch breath she was taking. “Wait,” she said in a rough voice, almost like a subdued moan, her lips parted just a breath away from his own. He stopped moving, his eyes never leaving hers with her blown out pupils with the peculiar violet colouring of her eyes almost gone, almost invisible. He could smell her whisky breath mingle with his own, see the desire ravage her gaze, feel her heart dancing too fast against his hand. 

But he wouldn’t make another move before she told him to. “Be careful with the dress,” she breathed against his lips, “it’s not mine.” 

He smiled, licking his bottom lips slowly, enjoying the way her eyes couldn’t look anywhere else before he unhooked his finger from the top hem of her dress to close them on the nape of her head to bring her eyes back to him. “I think you misunderstood my intentions,  _ love _ ,” he said, bringing her face to him, licking her lips, tasting her, but not  _ quite _ kissing her yet.

“Enlighten me then,” she demanded, her hand lost in his hair, fisting them to bring him to her mouth again in a clash of lips and tongue, of groans and moans. She caught his tongue in her mouth like she was welcoming it home. She was breathing him in, making him be a part of her. 

He moved back despite the way she fisted his hair in her hand to keep him there, despite the pain she was deliciously inflicting. “I will take my time and  _ slowly  _ unwrap you like a present,” he said, his thumb caressing her jaw, hovering over her pulse point, feeling the air catch in her throat. He nipped at the corner of her lips, catching a bit of their saliva with his tongue, dragging it down to her neck. “I will taste every inch of your skin I unwrapped and savour it,” he added, kissing and licking his way down her neck, growling when he met the barrier of her dress that was not even giving him access to her collarbone. “I will set each of your nerves on fire until you beg me to fuck you,” he groaned against her skin. 

She tilted her head to give him better access to her neck, like an offer, like a gift. He lightly bit down on her creamy skin, making her shiver, soothing the sting with the flat of his tongue, tasting the saltiness of her skin mixed with the bitterness of her perfume. “I won’t beg,” she said with certainty, the last word catching in her throat when he fastly turned her around, pinning her hands under his on the window. 

“You will,” he said with finality, like a promise, brushing his lips against her ear. 

“Give it your best shot, Commander,” she sassily said, pushing her back against him, a slight movement of her ass against his groin, almost imperceptible, with just enough friction to make him grunt in her ear. It was just enough to make him move his hands to her waist to bring her to him, to stop her, his thumb gracing the naked skin of her back. She held his gaze in the darkened window and he couldn’t miss the challenge heavy in her eyes, in the arched single eyebrow. 

She would beg him, he decided then, he would get under every seam she had, buried under her skin, deep in her bloodstream and in her bones, until she couldn’t remember anything other than him, until she couldn’t remember any touch other than his lips or his fingers.

He moved his hand flat on her stomach, pulling her to him, his other hand unhooking the belt around her waist, letting it fall on the floor with a clicking sound. He let his hands follow every curve of her body, leading him like a back road. He explored every seam of her dress, grazing her naked back with the callous tips of his fingers, with the coldness of his nails. 

He buried his nose in her silver locks, lost in her waves, in her scent full of sunshine and summer. He moved down her neck, following the path of his fingers with his lips, his tongue, his teeth, nipping at her skin, licking and kissing anything he came across. 

“Fuck,” she mumbled, shivering. 

He smiled against her back, looking at the red patches he left behind, the beard burning her skin, marking her. She was his for the night and he intended to make sure she remembered it in the morning, to make sure she could still feel it inside every nook of her body. 

He went down on his knee behind her, worshipping every part of her he came across. He found the hidden zipper travelling across her ass and pulled it down slowly, kissing every little expanse of skin he discovered with his open mouth, dampening the blood red string she was wearing underneath. 

Her dress fell in a chiming sound. Jon was certain it was the same sound a cloud would make dropping from the sky at his feet. He didn’t realize she pulled off her sleeves to let the dress fall, denying him the pleasure of disrobing her, depriving him of the discovery of her naked body. 

He clicked his tongue at her and sank his teeth in the flesh of her ass until she whelped, until she whimpered, shivering against his lips. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly, his tongue against the small bite mark on her ass, “I wanted to do it.” 

“Then get to it faster, Commander,” she almost growled, looking back at him down her shoulder with hooded eyes and a cheeky smile. He stifled a laugh against her buttocks, amused and amazed by the way she could exude power and confidence at the same time she would give him the power of  _ commanding  _ her, of bringing her to surrender while  _ he _ was the one on his knees. He didn’t know anything about her, about the silver woman in front of him, her ass tantalizingly moving against his beard, forcing him to nip at it again. He knew enough to guess she had more power running through her veins than anyone he knew. 

And she was  _ surrendering _ to him anyway. Her sassiness and cheekiness didn’t fool him, there was no doubt about it, no doubt about the surrender. 

“I want it slow, remember?” he said, his mouth open against her, nipping at her skin, punctuating every word with a touch of his tongue, slowly going to the elastic of her underwear, moving it slithy with his tongue and his teeth. 

She moved under his ministration, a shiver here, an involuntary buckle of her hips there, “I don’t,” she breathed, her forehead going back to her forearms on the huge bay window. She would be looking down the cliff if it weren’t for the darkness of the night. Now she was just looking down at their own reflection; a much more impressive view if he could give his opinion on the matter. 

“Too bad,” he said, watching her skin engulfed in goosebumps when his breath hit the wet patches he left behind with his tongue, “you know what to do.” 

He was met with her silence. She offered him nothing other than a shake of her head, a dance of her molten waves, a refusal to back down and  _ beg _ . He hooked his fingers under the side of her string, dragging it down as slow as he could, his tongue and his nose following the descent of the small piece of fabric until he could kiss his way to her ass crack. 

She whimpered, pushing herself against his mouth, “ _ qogralbar _ .” The valyrian word could have many meanings, but all of them would send him the same message of pleasure. He let her underwear fall down the rest of her leg to leave his hands go back to her hips and stabilized her, back to her buttocks to help him explore more, to let him move closer to her cunt, closer to the damp pleasure he could already smell. 

“ _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she said, and that he knew what it meant. It was the closest she would get to calling out his name.  _ Commander _ . 

He tasted her. Once. A quick lap from her fold to her ass, tasting every bit of her he could reach, to torture himself as much as he wanted to torture her. “Turn around,” he asked gently with a squeeze of his hand on her hip. 

She turned around and he was met with a small silver patch on top of her pubic bone, pointing the way to go, like a promising arrow. He moved the red cloud at their feet carefully, putting the dress on the side. 

“Do you have anything to say, Miss Snow?” he asked with a challenging tone, a glint of amusement in his eyes. 

She laughed and shakes her head at him, her laughter crashing and dying against her lips as soon as he lifted one of her legs, kissing the sensitive skin inside of her thigh, moving up with a slow pace, kissing and licking every inch of skin he discovered, going back to nip at it again as promised. 

_ He would make her beg.  _

He hooked her legs over his shoulder, one of his hands sprawled on her ass, the other one opening her gently, looking at her, at the dampness in front of him, wanting to taste her again like the forbidden fruit she was. He lapped at her from the bottom to the top, starting at her asshole, finishing his journey at the silver patch. She shivered again against him, her fingers closely tied around his raven lock, her eyes searching for his, finding them glued on her. She was magnificent, her immaculate hair in perfect contrast with the storm raging in her eyes, with the lipstick all over her lips.

He held her gaze as long as he could sustain the immobility, as long as he could resist her heat, her smell without tasting her again, without having her tangy taste on the tip of his tongue again. She smelled like sea salt, like the storm brewing in her eyes, and she tasted tangy with an after taste of sweetness he wanted to keep on his lips and in his mouth for a while. 

He  _ caved _ first. 

He opened his mouth at the top of her fold, breathing hot air against her, making her whimper his name again, “ _ Udrāzmio _ .” He pushed her back against the window, to make her feel like she was stuck between his mouth and a wall, with no way to escape, with nowhere to go, with no other solution than to beg him for mercy, for the things she wanted, for the release he was starting to weave tightly inside her with every bit of her he could find under his tongue, under his fingers. 

She cried out when the cold window touched her skin and let out a sharp hiss. She arched her back, pushing her hips toward him, her cunt into his mouth as he was pulling her in with the arm hooked under her leg, his hand still on her ass. He could feel her heat against his face, like flames surrounding him, her wetness like lava in his mouth. 

He started slowly, bringing her engorged fold in his mouth, drowning himself in her, hitting her small bundle of nerves with the tip of his nose before dragging his tongue across. He licked, he kissed and sucked at her fold, her entrance and her clit, mentally noting everything she liked, everything that made her fist his hair, that made her try to close her leg around his face, trapping him there, or that made her whimper his name wrapped in other valyrian words. She liked the laziness of the flat of his tongue slowly moving from her entrance to her clit, but she loved the fast motion of the tip of his tongue around it more. The graze of his teeth against it made her buckle her hips, searching for it again. He clicked his tongue, still against her pussy, pinching her ass cheek, “Stop moving, love,” he muffled between her legs before looking up at her, her mess probably all over his lips and beard, “unless you have something else to say?” 

She looked wild with her leg shaking on his shoulder, her perfect hair suddenly all over the place, all over the window and her back and shoulders. She had silver strands over her face, moving to the rhythm of her saccades breath. She shook her head, muttering a litany of words, bringing his face back to her cunt. 

“ _ Qogralbar, qogralbar, qogralbar _ ,” she mumbled incessantly, breathy like she couldn’t get enough air to say it louder, like she couldn’t breathe deep enough to mutter anything else than this hot strings of words sparkings in the air, inflaming everything around them. Her fingers seared themselves in his scalp, as deep as her nails could go. 

He took her to the edge every time, holding her over the cliff. He could feel her heartbeat, her blood pulse all around his mouth, all over his tongue before he brought her back on solid ground, never giving her the final push, never letting her take the final step, the final jump. He backed down every time he could feel her leg shaking, every time he could feel her pushed with her shoulders against the window to bring her cunt closer to his mouth, every time he could feel her fingers scratching at him for more. 

He stopped. He stopped until she stopped shaking, until she stopped moving, until her heart found her usual rhythm, until her breath stopped catching in her throat like winds catching in high trees. 

“ _ Kostilus, Udrāzmio _ ,” she said, plaintive, her voice cracking on the last word, her thigh attempting to close on his head, “ _ Nyke jorrāelagon naejot māzigon sir _ .”

He continued his exploration of her pleasure, his fingers putting a small pressure at her entrance with just the tip, circling around lazily, following the same pattern of his tongue around her clit, closer and closer, brushing it with the flat of his tongue, putting more pressure for a second or two before pulling away. 

She pulled his hair harder, pulling his face away from her to look down at him, whimpering when his lips detached from her cunt. “That was me  _ begging  _ you,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she panted, to refer to her previous litany of valyrian. 

Jon had half a mind to make her say it in the common tongue, to make her mumble  _ more,  _ to make her shake with want, but the valyrian words were enough. They went straight to his cock, putting a smug grin to his drenched lips right before she pushed him back against her cunt. 

He went back to her fold, to her clit, pushing his finger inside her cunt, bending them to massage the ridge part inside. He closed his mouth at the apex of her sex, engulfing her clit in a hot mess of steaming breath. She moaned around his name, around the ‘commander’ that kept coming out of her lips in a throaty plea for him to continue. He sucked at her clit, flicking it with the tip of his tongue, adding a finger in her cunt until she squirmed, until she couldn’t contain the sharp movement of her hips, until she couldn’t hold on his hair harder, until she couldn’t bring his face more into her than it already was. 

“ _ Iksan māzis _ ,” she wept, crashing her head back against the window in a loud bang. “I’m coming,” she translated for him, as if he couldn’t understand her body language, as if he couldn’t feel it against his tongue, against his scalp and in the way she mumbled the words. He may not speak High Valyrian, but he knew exactly what she meant, exactly which cliff she needed him to push her over, exactly on which edge she was balancing off. 

He pushed her over with the same suction, the same flick of his tongue, the same movement of his fingers. He pushed her, catching her with his hand on her ass, with the other hand on her pelvis, catching her pleasure on his tongue, all over his mouth and down his chin, sipping at her until she couldn’t move her hips anymore, until she couldn’t do  _ anything _ anymore.

“Fuck,” she muttered, catching her breath, looking down at him, locking her eyes with him, biting her bottom lips to keep her moan from tumbling out when he licked his lips to catch any remnant of her he could get, never breaking their gaze. “This was  _ alright _ ,” she said out of breath. 

He laughed at her words, at the glint in her eyes, bringing his forehead to her pelvis, breathing his laugh onto her sensitive skin, onto the silver patch of hair, damp with his own sweat. 

A breathless whimper escaped her when he brought her leg down his shoulder after a quick kiss to her thigh. She smelled like arousal and basic needs, like sex. He stood up, trapping her against the cold window, feeling her heat burn everything she touched, inflaming his skin, turning his bones to dust. She looked at him under her lashes, with hooded eyes still blurry with pleasure, still heavy with her orgasm, and all he wanted was to kiss her, to bury his tongue in the heat of her mouth and burn. 

He hesitated for a second, her mess still on his face, and she took the choice right out of his mouth with her own, kissing him like he was water in the middle of the desert. She moaned against his lips and the remnant of her own scent still lingering in his beard, against the taste still remaining on the roof of his mouth that she was tracing with her tongue. 

He followed her lead, the slow but captivating rhythm she was bringing with the lazy movement of her lips, with the slow dance of her tongue in his mouth. Her hands couldn’t stay in place, like she couldn’t choose a place for them to rest between his hair, his neck, his chest or his shoulder. She trailed her hand down his chest, tugging on his shirt to explore under, dancing on his abs, her nails scraping against every ridge of muscle she could find, smiling against his lips when she felt the muscle tightening under the tips of her fingers. 

She let go of his mouth to breathe, the air between their mouths charged with her heat and the saltiness of her cunt, charged with everything yet to come. She unhooked his belt and opened his pants to fisted her fingers around his cock, rubbing the precum on the tip of it with her thumbs. “Fuck,” he said on her lips, his hips jerking involuntarily. 

“Now, I want you to fuck me, Commander,” she said hovering over his mouth, her tongue slowly trying to catch any remaining glimpse of herself on his lips, and his chin. She moved her hand slowly, dragging every movement, every twist of her wrist. It was payback. He knew it was payback. 

“Yes, I think that would be  _ alright _ ,” he said, using the same word as her, letting his forehead drop to hers, incapable of controlling his breathing, the constriction of his throat closing tighter every time her thumb travelled across the head of his cock. 

She laughed, exhaling over his face, moving the small amount of black curls she managed to pull out of his bun. There was something in her eyes that had nothing to do with desire, but was completely alluring to him anyway; it was a spark, a small glint full of humour and suppressed laughter, full of something  _ more.  _

He loved this look as much as he loved her sinful look glazed with hunger  _ for him.  _

She let go of his cock and it bounced back on his belly, trapped between her heat and his, free of his trousers. He growled, like a cornered animal that was denied what he wanted. She licked her hand, dripping spit on it, going back to his cock, slipping with ease, increasing the speed, rounding the head. His fingers closed tighter around the nape of her neck, still trapped in the wildness that was becoming her hair. He couldn’t look away from her. She wasn’t even blinking, looking at him like he was the only thing she could ever see, smirking every time he muttered a curse under his breath, every time he had to roll his forehead against hers. 

He let go of her skin for a second, his numb fingers trying to find the buttons of his uniform shirt, breathing her in, searching her eyes when she clicked her tongue at him. “You’ll keep it on for this round,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she demanded, her voice dripping with filth. He grunted, stilling his hands. There was nothing hoter for him at the moment than him fucking her in his work uniform, sulling the Night’s Watch name, draging it in a mix of his sweat and her come. 

She slid her hands down to his balls, fiddling with them and he clasped his hand on her wrist, “You need to stop.” He couldn’t take it anymore. 

She nodded. “Condoms,” she said, pointing at her nightstand with her chin, giggling when he almost tripped over her dress in his eagerness to get there. 

He wrapped his cock, walking back to her, surprised when he saw that she had turned around, her hands on the windows, her ass moving, tempting him. The view she was giving him was arresting. Every curve of her body seemed to have been carved with care, with love, like a masterpiece. She looked back at him, bringing her hair to her chest, offering him access to her back, to her long neck, to the perfect arc of her spine. He faltered, his breath catching in his throat for a moment. 

The hooded eyes full of desire and promises were back, weakening his knees. 

“I want you to take me,” she said, not afraid of asking exactly what she wanted, offering herself with a bow of her back, her ass toward him, her hoarse voice almost too alluring. 

“Yes,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” he saluted, laughing around the syllables, butchering the valyrian word and making her laugh. He never laughed before sex, he doesn’t even think he ever laugh that much with a woman in general, least of all before sex. It felt more like companionship than a one nightstand, it felt too natural for people that don’t even know their names. 

Her laugh changed into a guttural moan when he slowly slipped his cock between her ass cheeks, moving up and down toward her cunt leisurely, one hand on her hips, the other arm banding around her, a hand closing around her breast, rolling her nipple between his fingers. 

He took her as she asked. In one swift motion, he was buried in her to the hilt, panting at the same time as her. She was enveloping him like a second skin, like every part of her cunt was made to engulf every inch of him, every ridge of his cock. He watched her in the darkened glass of the window; the way her teeth clamped on her lower lips to prevent her cry, only letting him hear a small moan, the way her head lolled back on his shoulder and her hands were trying to find purchase on the glass. 

She was breathtaking. 

He moved his hand toward the creamy expanse of her throat, running his finger on her skin, going back to her breast, wanting to touch every part of her he could get while watching her reactions. He watched her in the glass when he licked at her neck, when he grazed his teeth on her shoulder, when he slowly got out of her to go in again with the same maddening pace. 

“Look at yourself,” he said, turning her head toward the window, his mouth lost behind her ear, lost behind all the moans and whimpers he managed to get out of her from there with every brush of his lips, with every pass of his scruffy beard. He met her darkened eyes in the reflection, charged with desire and want, “at yourself,” he repeated against her skin, watching her eyes move from his to her own. 

She was amazingly beautiful in every sharp breath she was taking, with her mouth slightly open, in every strand of her hair sticking to her sweat, in every bounce of her breast every time he moved. She needed to see it, to see herself come undone, to see her own flesh burst in flame, consuming all of her. 

“You’re beautiful,” he breathed, his fingers holding her tighter, bringing her to him, snapping his hips against her ass, earning a throaty moan from her lips. She followed the movement of his hand with her eyes, watching it travelled down her breast to her stomach, to the silver patch at the apex of her sex, down her fold, around his cock to collect some of her mess to finally graze her clit. 

He moved his fingers with the same interest he moved his mouth earlier, taking notes of every shiver, every bite of her lips, every mumble sound and every time she pushed her ass harder on him, meeting him halfway, thrust for thrust, trying to increase the pace. 

She let go of the glass to meet his hand with her own, to increase the pressure, to show him exactly what she wanted, the right pace, the right amount of pressure and the right motion. 

“Fuck,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she moaned, rocking back against him. Her head lolled against his shoulder again, her other hand slipping against the cold window, searching for something to hold on, finding the white curtains at the tip of her fingers, fisting them like they were her saviour. “Harder. Faster.” 

She was demanding, not pleading, not playing, just demanding for exactly what she needed from him. He met her faster, trusting harder, moving her against the window, hearing the sound of the curtain shackled, ripping under her hand, mixed with the wet sound of his trust, with the slapping sound of his hips against her ass, like a melody he wanted to hear on repeat. 

She cried out, gripping the curtains with her other hand, closing her eyes, panting. 

“At yourself, love,” he insisted again. She couldn’t miss the exquisite sight she was, she couldn’t miss the way her body moved, the way her face reacted to every move of his cock or his fingers, the way she’ll look when she came. She whimpered, but still straightened her head to look back at their reflection, to look back at herself come undone, moaning at the sight of it. 

“Daenerys,” she panted, between a litany of Valyrian words, between a symphony of other sounds coming out of her messy lips. “My name,” she tried to find her breath, just enough to finish her thought, just enough to specify, “it’s Daenerys.”

The way she said it, the way she found his gaze in the glass, the way she faltered, messily meeting his trust with her own, almost made him come on the spot. He could feel the tightness in his balls and had to breathe deeply in her damp hair, trying to find his sense back between the citrus and the lavender. 

_ Daenerys. _

He just knew it was something special, something alluring. It fitted. 

He smiled. balls deep in her cunt, he smiled… and she smiled back. It was a lopsided smile, lazy, perfect. 

“Look at yourself come, Daenerys,” he demanded, rolling the name on his tongue, tasting it. She fluttered around him, her cunt clamping on him like a delicious trap, like the roll of her name in his mouth was the only thing missing to push her over the edge again, to make her come around his cock, her cunt shaking in sync with her legs. 

She watched every second of her orgasm. 

It was the hottest thing he saw in a long time. 

He growled, holding her tighter, keeping her upright, chasing his own orgasm only a couple thrusts away. He called out her name when he emptied himself in the condom, seconds before he sank his teeth on her shoulder while she was riding the last bit of her release. 

He blindly searched for her lips, kissing her shoulder, her neck, her jaw, before she finally turned her face to meet him in a sloppy war of lips and tongue, in a kiss neither of them were able to control. He breathed his name in her mouth, holding her to him with a hand in her hair. 

_ Jon.  _


	2. 1440 Minutes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! 
> 
> Huge thanks to everyone that read the first chapter of this Christmas fic that will obviously be complete AFTER Christmas... oops! 
> 
> I want to thank my beautiful beta Hayl for all the love and for reading this in record time! I love you and I don't know what I would do without you! All remaining mistakes are mine and mine alone! 
> 
> Please take note that I will avoid writing any group settings in the future if I can help it. This. Killed. Me. 
> 
> Welcome to the land of sexy hallmark, no gag reflex and no refractory period! ENJOY!

**Now**

The first thing he realized was the coldness, the sharp bite of icy air on the bare skin of his chest, freezing the edges of his scars. It was nothing new, nothing unusual. It was another day at Always Winter, another day of numbness. 

_ Except it wasn’t.  _

Jon opened his eyes. He wasn’t at Always Winter, he was in Winterfell, in his childhood room with the dark tones of a forest at night; with deep greens and rich browns. He was back in his room, the fire completely out in the hearth. He didn’t bother to keep it on when he went to bed with Daenerys on top of him, warming the room better than any fire could. 

She was fire made flesh. 

He straightened himself on his elbows, looking around the room, pushing his wild curls out of his eyes to search for her, for the woman attached to the hand responsible for the wildness of his hair. He saw her on the other side of the room, in front of an old mirror, braiding her silver hair and looking like a glossy dream, like she was right out of his imagination, out of a cherished memory. 

_ She was looking fully fucking dressed.  _

He grunted at the image of her clad in a knitted dress and black thighs, falling back on the bed, bouncing on the mattress. She jumped at the soft noise, surprised, letting her braid slip from her fingers. She locked eyes with him in the mirror, making him think of another time he looked at her through a reflection, of another time with less clothing. 

“You robbed me of the morning after?” he asked—  _ accused,  _ incapable of masking his disappointment of seeing her fully dressed and out of bed already. 

“Morning after what exactly?” she asked, walking back to him, adding something sinful in the movement of her hips. He looked at her shamelessly. “Absolutely nothing happened last night,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she added, with a light in her eyes, amusement dancing with her lips, “you were hurt.” 

“Woman, you’re cruel.” 

She sat on the edge of the bed next to him with a soft laugh. Her hand found its way to one of his scars, tracing the contour of it, smirking at the way his muscles constricted under her nails, the way he took a sharp intake of breath. 

_ Fucking cruel woman indeed.  _

He grabbed the end of her hair, undoing the braid that was already loosening, ignoring her halfhearted protest between the bells of her laugh. He prefered her hair loose. flowing on her back, melting between his fingers, cascading like a winter waterfall, embracing the wildness behind her polishness, embracing her fire and her wind. 

He prefered her hair loose because it was the only way he knew it. 

“Let me look at your head,” she asked, waiting for him to sit in the bed, to turn and offer his head for her to look at the bump… again. 

“No,” he said, holding the hem of her grey dress and pulling it toward him, “let me look at  _ you  _ instead _.” _ He pouted like a child, hoping it could push her to get undressed again, to get back under the covers and bring the fire into his veins and forget the world one more time. 

_ Just one more time.  _

He knew that he could never be satisfied with so little now that his mind knew too much, that his body remembered everything, every parcel of her, every movement of her body. 

He would always ask for one more day, for 1440 more minutes. 

_ One more day until the last of his days. _

“No,” she laughed, pushing his hand away, leaning on him, her chin on his chest, “you need to get up now.” She was soft on the edges, a halo of morning light around her like it was coming from her, like she was the actual sun. He wrapped an arm around her waist and groaned again, keeping her flushed to his chest, “I didn’t remember you being this cranky in the morning,” she said with a smile on her lips, his hand playing with her hair, the other bunching up her dress over her ass. 

“To be fair, you were still naked that first morning.” 

_ She was still naked with her mouth all over him.  _

She let her forehead fall on his chest, her puff of air heating a trail of fire on his skin. “Fair enough,” she said, her lips against his skin,  _ almost  _ kissing it. 

They were stuck in a new kind of limbo they didn’t see coming. They were no longer strangers, but they were not friends. He had no intention of being her friend. 

They were a one night stand that died just before it could be more, a morning after that expanded so it could exist for one more day, for 1440 more minutes. They were just a girl in a bar wrapping herself in boundaries and limits, and just a boy with a foot on the next plane, wishing he could stay longer, wishing she would let him. 

She got up again, struggling to slide out of his arms, laughing again when he mumbled his insatisfaction, straightening up after her to let her look at his head. There was nothing else he wished to accomplish anymore other than make her laugh over, and over again. He wanted to hear that sound every morning and see the way it could morph her face. 

She slid behind him, her fingers already searching for the bump on his head, for the consequence of her snow globe attack, repeating the routine they did multiple times during the night. 

“Aren’t you supposed to ask questions about my life to see if I have a concussion?” he asked. 

She paused and stilled her movements all around him; her hands in his hair, her legs on either side of him, her breath on his neck. She was thinking, considering his words, searching for her own. “Even if I ask you questions, I wouldn’t be able to know if your answers are correct,” she finally admitted. 

As soon as her words registered in his mind, he regretted asking the question. He didn’t want to remind her they didn’t know each other, to go back in time to the moment they were just strangers in a bar, two people sharing small moments, glimpses of life, interludes. 

_ But wasn’t it the beginning of any story?  _ Small moments. Glimpses of life. Interludes. Strangers to eventually  _ more. _

_ She said it the night before; time for strangers was over.  _

“Ask anyway,” he said, silently begging her to take that small step toward …  _ more _ . 

“Okay,” she sighed gently in his hair, an arm closing around him, her hand resting on the top of his thigh, like there was nothing more natural than that moment. “Are you married?” she asked cheekily, her chin moving on his shoulder. He could feel her smile against him by the way her chin raised against his shoulder, by the way her cheek moved against his neck. 

He guffawed. “No,” he assured, backing down against her, pinning her against the headboard, his back flushed against her front. He felt more comfortable than the itchy dress should ever allow anyone to feel. He forgot the cold air in the room biting his skin. 

“What is your favourite holiday?” she asked in a whisper against his ear, settling more comfortably, moving her hands in an abstract pattern against his skin, taking that step, leaping toward  _ more.  _

“Christmas,” he said, his eyes closed, his head lolling back. He chose to ignore the pain irradiating from his bump, he chose to concentrate all he had on the feeling of her wrapped around him, on the feeling of the morning after absolutely  _ nothing  _ happened. 

“Favourite Color?”

“Black.”

“That’s not a color,” she protested, running her fingers between his abs, tracing a road back to his chest, making him breakout in goosebumps, “it’s the absence of color.”

He could actually see her and Sansa being friends, having poor opinions on what could be considered a color or not. 

“Forest green then,” he corrected, pointing at the color of his wall, a green so dark it was almost black, like pine trees at night. He craned his neck to roll his eyes at her and yelped in surprise when she bit the tendon in his neck in retaliation. He laughed under his breath, trying to bring his shoulder to his ears to protect his neck from her teeth. 

All of this felt right somehow, like another extension of their story, like she asked for just another day again, for more moments, for more minutes. 

“Did you always want to be in the Night’s Watch?” She continued, her fingers tracing the scars she already knew, the scars she already explored in another day, in another time, basked in morning lights and draped in white sheets on an immense bed. 

“No,” he answered truthfully, “I actually wanted to be a pilot or a history teacher.” 

_ He sort of became a pilot in the end.  _

“Really?” She asked, surprised. Her fingers stopped moving against his skin, “What the hell happened?”

“A girl happened.” 

A girl happened. Wild. Free. Inconsiderate for anyone else’s feelings. Heartbreaking in everything she chose to be. Judgmental in everything  _ he  _ chose to be. A mistake in every possible way. A learning experience in few of them.

“Let me get that straight; you went and enlisted in the most dangerous division of our military forces... for a  _ girl _ ?” She asked incredulously, detaching every word slowly. She tugged on the end of his hair to make him look at her, one of her eyebrows perfectly arched in derision. He could hear it in her voice, and see it on her face how much she disagreed with his thought process at the time. 

“To  _ escape _ a girl, to be exact,” he specified, as if that answer was better somehow. 

“So stupid,” she muttered, shaking her head, her cheek moving against his hair.

“My mother would love you,” he said cheekily. Disapproving his career choice was a sure way into his mother’s heart, calling him out on it was a sure way to have a permanent place in it. 

“She already does,” she said flippantly with a move of her hand, like there was no way his mother wouldn’t love her. He had absolutely no doubt about it, about anything she ever said to him, about the fact Catelyn Stark must have fallen in love with her, about the fact Daenerys was a great friend. She said everything with so much certainty, there was no way to doubt her. 

“Was your escape a success?” she asked then. 

It took him a moment to get away from the expense of his heart at the idea of his mother loving Daenerys, to understand and remember what they were talking about, to get back to the girl he ran away from. 

“Aye,” he simply said. It was a success. Ygritte was not in his life anymore and he wasn’t tempted to go back to her because of how easy it was, of how  _ familiar  _ it felt being disappointed by her in the end. He was used to it. He was always preparing himself for it. At some point in his life, being hurt by what she did, being disappointed by what she didn’t do was easier than anything else. In the end, it wasn’t even hurting anymore, anyway. It was just there, black hole of resentment in a 19 year old boy incapable of communication. 

“Why did you keep it up? Why stay in the military after that?”

“Because I am good at it,” he answered before reminding her, “and I do love a good fight.” He was good at his job, at fighting for others, at assessing enemies, at eliminating threats, at strategies. 

He was good. 

Not everyone loves what they’re good at. 

“Is it enough?” she asked softly, somehow understanding, reading the sorrow between his words, between his breath. 

“No.” 

Direct. Honest. exactly like them, like they were since the beginning…  _ minus the identities _ .

She humed, tacitly registering his answer, filling it in her mind for further use, not pushing the knife any deeper, not cutting in a new scar. 

“What is your favourite memory?” she asked, stirring the conversation. 

“An encounter with a stranger in Dragonstone,” he answered without thinking, without really meaning to. He felt her breath catch in his curls, her heart speed against his back, “she was a girl in a bar,” he said, his fingers finding hers on his abs, “she smelled like summer.” 

She was silent for a bit, tightening the hold she had around him. “Smooth motherfucker,” she murmured in his ear with something that suspiciously sounded like fond affection, making him shake with laughter again.

They stayed like that for a bit, in her multiple questions, in the comfort of their silence between them, in the comfort of each other. they ignored the world for a bit. They were good at that, at pretending they could just extend their moment, at just pretending it wouldn’t end, pretending they didn’t need to ask for  _ more _ . 

They had to get up, to get out. He had to see his family. Surprise his mother. 

He just wanted a little bit more. Again. Always. 

There was a knock at the door and Daenerys didn’t flinch. She didn’t move away or act like they were caught in a compromising situation; she just looked up toward the door, her hand never wavering from his own. His heart started racing in his chest, chasing hers, chasing the meaning, because it felt like  _ more,  _ like just a bit over it. 

The door opened to reveal Sansa in all her morning glory, still clad in her flannel pajamas, her flaming hair flying over her face, and a huge smile slicing her face in two at the sight of him. He saw her falter right past the door, her icy blue eyes locked on Daenerys... the silhouette of her wrapped around him like a vine before they locked back on him. 

“What the Hells?” she muttered under her breath. Jon could feel Daenerys laugh behind his ear, her nose lost in his hair, her face hidden from Sansa. 

“Thanks for my Christmas present, Sans,” Daenerys said, finally looking up at her best friend, at his sister frozen in the middle of his room like a fish out of the ocean, desperately trying to find its way back, to find meaning in what she was seeing. She looked desperate to find her words. Daenerys punctuated her own with her free hand traveling his chest, resting right on top of his racing heart, right on top of his biggest scar, tapping it with the tip of her index finger. 

_ He _ was the christmas present. 

“Seriously, Dany?” Sansa said with what he was pretty sure was the most dignified gagging sound he ever heard in his life. 

_ She told him her friends called her Dany.  _

It was all true, all coming together in his mind. The pieces of the puzzle slided in place like they were just sliding home, confirming the picture he was supposed to create. 

He looked at Sansa and laughed at the stinky eyes he probably earned from her in some ways between Daenerys and the gingerbread he destroyed, laughing at the outrage in her eyes similar to all those times he pushed her to her limits and enjoyed the shitstorms he created for himself.

“Oh my gods! Aren’t you my Christmas present?” Daenerys exclaimed, detaching every sound, every syllable like a hugely flawed actress. He snickered, and tried to cover it with their joined hands over his mouth. “There was a huge misunderstanding,” she continued, her unnatural voice inexplicably and suddenly taking a Dornish accent, “I thought you were my Christmas present!” She looked at him with her violet eyes as big as they can get, her fake surprise dipped in mischief. “Who are you?” she exclaimed, pushing him over to untangle herself from him, making him laugh again in his pillow, in the pillow that smelled like summer. 

Sansa rolled her eyes, trying her hardest to hide the smile pulling at the corner of her lips. She had always been shit at hiding her feelings because she had her heart painted on her face at all times, changing the colors of her eyes and the lights in them. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Hilarious,” she said, finally stepping toward them, “thank Gods you don’t have a career in comedy, Dany. We would be in deep shit.”

“Thank Gods indeed,” Daenerys answered, getting up and kissing Sansa on the cheek, making her roll her eyes again. He could hear their mom in his mind telling her that she would get stuck like that if the winds ever decided to change direction. 

“I think it was funny,” he huttered as his first words to his sister, earning a retreating laugh from Daenerys skipping to the bathroom and an annoyed sound from Sansa.

“Shut up, Jon,” Sansa huffed, slapping his shoulder, making him laugh harder, “I’m already mad at you for the gingerbread cookies! You took the best ones.” 

“They were delicious,” he said, giving her his most blinding smile, remembering that he actually never finished the stolen goods before he got attacked by a snow globe and found the woman he couldn’t get out of his mind in his room, in his bed. His gaze went to the still open bathroom door, his ears strained to hear the muffled sound she made, the movement of fabrics, the dancing of socked feet sliding on tiles, the humming of a Christmas song. 

“Now I feel like I should be mad at you for more than just gingerbread cookies,” she pointedly said, following his sight to the open door, pinching the tender skin under his arm to make him jump. 

“For fuck sake, Sansa that hurt,” he yelped, cradling his arm against his chest. “I came back for you!” he said, trying to guilt trip her into being nice.

“Please,” she scoffed, “you came back for mom.” He didn’t like her tone, it was her damn lawyer tone, like he couldn’t lie to her anymore or glossed over the truth, like he couldn’t let anything pass by her without her calling him out on his shit. 

“And a  _ little bit _ for you,” he mumbled. It was the truth. He came back a little bit for all of them, missing something about each one of them, needing all the small pieces of home they provided. 

He missed the warmth of their mother’s embrace, the controlled voice of their father when he gives unsolicited advice. He missed Robb’s cocky grin, Sansa’s emotions all over the place, Arya’s snort when they teamed up together against everyone else, Bran’s comfortable silence and Rickon’s infinitely long hugs. He even missed Gendry’s stupid smug face. 

“Does she know you’re back?” Sansa asked, bringing him back to the present and out of his own mind. He knew she was talking about their mother. He also knew she didn’t have to ask the question, she would have known if it was the case. They would have all knew he was coming home for Christmas if their mother had had this information. 

“No one knows,” he answered anyway. 

“Except me because you felt the need to destroy my gingerbread cookies,” she huffed, bringing up the goddamn cookies again, annoyed. Except she wasn’t. The icy blue could never truly lie. It would be her demise. For a girl that could never lie, her going into laws and politics always felt like an odd choice to him. 

“Because you felt the need to taunt me with them,” he said with a smile, tugging on her hair. “You missed me Sans,” he sing-songed, amused by the way she was battling against her lips, against her eyes, against every part of her face slowly betraying her, “stop pretending otherwise.”

She lost the battle against herself and smiled at him. Her eyes misted over with her emotions, with every parcel of joy and excitement she had when she came in the door, with everything she momentarily forgot when she discovered them. “I missed you so much, Jon,” she whispered, launching herself at him, hugging him with all the force she could mastered for what felt like forever. 

He closed his eyes, a small piece of his heart settled back home, a piece in the shape of her. 

They hugged in comfortable silence for a while, until he could feel her pinch him again. “What were you doing half naked in a bed with my best friend?” she whispered between her teeth, still holding him in a tight hug. 

She would not let this go. 

“She was fully fucking dressed, Sansa,” he said, annoyed. Annoyed at her, but mostly at the fact that Daenerys was effectively fully dressed against him earlier.

“Don’t you dare,” Sansa said under her breath, taking his face in her hands to force him to look back at her and not in the direction of the bathroom door, in the direction of  _ her.  _ “Don’t,” she repeated, looking him directly in the eye. She looked so much like their mother; failing miserably at trying to be stern. There was too much softness in their face.

__

“Don’t what?” he asked, his face still squeezed between her hands, his lips crooked by the force of it. 

“Don’t pull an Arya on me!” He grunted at that, at the reminder of Arya and  _ his _ best friend, at the horror of it all. 

He batted her hand away from his face, scowling at her. She couldn’t help it really, annoying each other to no ends was the way they loved each other. She smiled knowingly, like she was proud she reminded him of his best friend and their sister. “I hate you, Sans.”

“I’m glad you’re home,” she responded.

He opened his mouth to answer when he heard the soft sound of Daenerys feet sliding on the floor to the end of the bed, making him lose track of his words, of all his mind. 

He shouldn’t be able to, but he could recognize the sound of her mouvements, the sound of her starting her day. 

“I’m glad too,” he finally said, his eyes on Daenerys, the snort of his sister in his ear. 

___

He let Daenerys and Sansa go down first after dodging every one of his sister’s attempts at piecing together what she saw that morning, what it meant. He didn’t even know what it all meant, she’ll have to wait for him to figure it out for himself. He wanted it to mean something he longed for back in Dragonstone, he wanted it to mean she wanted it too. 

Jon stopped in the alcove just before entering the kitchen and watched his family simply ...exist. He watched them prepare breakfast together as a dysfunctional but charming team. He waited for that telltale tug of his guts, for that itchy feeling of the scar on top of his heart, for those ways his body was telling him he was  _ craving  _ it. 

He was craving moments like this. 

His eyes scanned over everyone, over Arya and Gendry, his dad sat on the small breakfast table with his face behind his paper, Rickon beating eggs for way too long, over everyone until he came across the silver hair that finally found their way back into a braid, until he found the auburn hair of his mother. She had her hand on Daenerys’s shoulder and it tugged at something else in his gut, it itched deeper in his chest, enough for him to scratch the skin in the middle of it. 

_ She already does.  _ She was right. His mother does seem to already love her. 

He stepped a foot into the kitchen and she was the first one to look at him, like she could recognize the exact sound of his mouvement, like he wasn’t alone in this. She blindly smiled at him, with all her face, as if she forgot he was even here, as if the reminder pleased her immensely. 

She was happy to see him again. 

She whispered something and took a bowl out of his mother’s hand. She must have said something about him because he never saw Catelyn Stark move this fast in his life other than that time Bran fell from the tallest tree he could find in the backyard, wanting to touch the sky and become a crow of some sort.

Her hands were shaking, loosening around the ghost of a bowl she wasn’t holding anymore, that she would have dropped and shattered on the floor if Daenerys didn’t take it away from her seconds prior. With trembling fingers against her lips, she strode towards him. She had wiped a thousand of his tears with those shaking fingers.

“Oh, my beautiful boy,” she said tenderly, her voice wavering, her watery eyes scanning him like she was reading a book that she knew by heart, like she was just trying to find her favourite line and all the pages she dog-eared.

Her fingers ran across his face, taking inventory of everything he was, slowing down on every little silver scar she already knew and on every pink one she just discovered. He let her do it. He let her take inventory of every scratch on him, of every piece until he could hear her mutter the same thing, the same sentence she always says after a click of her tongue. 

“Don’t go and ruin my good work, Jon.” 

There it was, the same old sentence, the same plea, the same supplication for him to stay safe, to treat himself with care, like his mother would.

“I know,” he said with a happy sigh when she closed her arms around him, bringing him down to her, cradling his head in the space between her neck and shoulder, in the space he used to fall asleep in. “I know. It took you years to put me back together and make sure I was the best human being I could possibly be,” he finished for her, his face in her hair that smelled like white sage and tea, like  _ home _ .

She loosened her grip on him to look back at him, his face in her hands, her thumbs running across his cheekbone, “you're the best Christmas gift I could ask for, baby.” 

It was the second time of the day someone referred to him as a Christmas gift and he couldn’t help but feel the embarrassment tint the top of his cheeks and the back of his neck. 

“And what are we? Horse’s shit?” Robb asked, getting up to hug him, his cocky grin in place, like he was actually  _ good _ , like the Christmas spirit brought back the smile his ex-wife took with her in their nasty divorce. 

“He had always been the favourite,” Sansa said under her breath, loud enough for everyone to hear. 

“Of course he’s the favourite,” Ned assured, putting his paper back on the table, looking at them with a glint in his eyes, “you were born in this family, we—” 

“—We actually chose Jon,” every Stark kid finished in unison, grumbling. Jon could imagine their eyes rolling to the back of their head, like they always do. 

It was the same thing every time, the same reminder that they were born into this family, and Jon was made for this family, the chosen one, sent by the old gods and by the new. They were all hearing that since forever. 

Jon hugged everyone, his smile getting bigger when he saw Arya’s face, when she pushed him and called him an asshole again, quickly grabbing him by the shoulder to keep him against her for way longer than anyone else. She hugged him with all the force her small body may contain, with all the Christmases during which she couldn’t hold him like that, because summer breaks were not the same. 

“I think you’re the favourite only because you’re reckless and they just know you’re going to die first,” Arya said mumbling against his chest, pulling on the neck of his shirt to see the biggest of his scar again, to see the jagged skin. She pulled the shirt lower to see the multitude of small silver scars littering his upper chest from a shrapnel explosion. She poked at them harder than necessary with a snarl on her face. 

“Arya Stark!” their mother exclaimed beside them in a tone that meant Arya would need to apologize to him in the near future and refuse to do it. She never said something she didn’t mean. She will not apologize for it. If Jon was reckless, Arya Stark was ten times worse than him in enough ways to make their mother pray and grow white hairs that she blamed on either one of them depending on her mood. 

Arya and their mother started bickering and Jon got down just in time to catch Rickon throwing himself at him, his wild curls falling into his eyes, his arms closed tightly around his neck, almost choking the air out of him. 

“Jon,” he exclaimed, excited, “I’m so happy to see you! I thought I’ll have to wait for the summer again. Did you know that I’m a choice too?” Rickon said in rapid succession with a small lisp due to his two missing front teeth and the pink tongue he kept sticking in the hole, making Jon dizzy. 

“We must share the favourite spot then,”  _ like we share everything,  _ Jon said, straightening up with the 5 years old boy in his arms, his legs kicking the air around them. 

He was right, he was as much a choice, as Jon. He was the miracle their mother waited for when almost all of them left the nest, when the big house was suddenly empty. She swore left and right she could hear the echo of her breath in the house. 

Jon met his biological mother once, just enough for her to break his heart in a million pieces, to ruin all the good work of Catelyn Stark, to undo all of her effort in putting him back together, to make him believe he deserved the internal ache that came with the Night’s Watch. It was also just enough time to meet Rickon, to meet the two weeks old she couldn’t keep — _ wouldn’t keep _ . He fell in love with the newborn, like the beginning of a snowstorm; blindly, with force and with nothing in him to try and stop it. 

Cat took him in like it was the only logical way of going about it, like it was as easy as breathing. 

_ It probably was for her.  _

Rickon was the smart sibling between the two of them, choosing to become a Stark when they gave him the choice, the same options they offered him at the same age. 

Jon brought him closer to him, closing his eyes and resting his cheek on the top of his hair, his unruly curls the exact same texture as his, just lighter to make people think he was angelic even if he was anything but. Jon didn’t care about the sticky little fingers on his neck, he just cared about the boy, the love and the hug... the infinitely long hug. 

“Jon!” Rickon almost screamed in his ear, making him wince, “did you meet Dany?” 

Jon looked up to find Daenerys violet eyes on him. She was smiling at him knowingly, not hiding anything. He never saw her as beautiful as she was at that moment, not in the bar, not against her window, not even gloriously naked in her bed. There was something utterly domestic about her now, in the middle of his mother’s kitchen, filling something inside of him he never really knew existed before. 

“Isn’t she pretty?” the boy tried to whisper in his ear, “she has moon hair, and she’s as soft as Sansa, and she let me have her desert, and—” 

“Down, Tiger,” Jon interrupted, laughing, understanding the marvel in his brother's eyes, yet again sharing something with him. “I did meet her,” he said with a smirk, “she thought I was a criminal and attacked me with a snow globe.” 

Everyone started asking questions at the same time. The questions were almost louder than Arya’s hysterical laugh. He kept his eyes on Daenerys, looking at her throw her head back with a grunt and a puff of air. “I didn’t know he was the favourite child at the time,” she answered for everyone. 

_ Always so cheeky.  _

“Oh my gods, dear, are you okay?” his mother asked. He wasn’t sure which one of them should answer the question as he wasn’t sure to whom she asked it in the first place. “How did you manage the sleeping arrangement?” she asked next, her eyes on him with a lifted eyebrow, leaving no place to question for who that question was. She knew him way too well. 

“Oh, they managed just fine,” Sansa grumbled, stealing a strawberry in Daenerys’ bowl. 

“Sansa…” he warned, looking back at her in time to see her flip him the middle finger petulantly, mirth in her eyes and a smirk on her lips. 

“Jon.” 

“It was fine,” he finally told his mother after rolling his eyes at Sansa, resorting to the same juvenile behaviour she had. “We already knew each other anyway,” he explained, hoping that a small explanation would be sufficient for all of them, but knowing deep down that it would not suffice in any possible way. 

They could never mind their own fucking business. 

Minding each other's business was their love language. 

“To keep you updated, I called dibs yesterday,” Robb said, clasping his hand on Jon’s shoulder, his ever present cocky grin in place, looking at Daenerys in the corner of his eyes.

“Robert Edmur Stark, you better not be talking about a woman that way,” their mother said, going back to her bowl, mixing the batter for the famous strawberry waffles they could only get during Christmas and winter breaks. 

_ Apparently the waffle maker disappear after the breaks.  _

“Yes, Robert Edmur Stark you better not,” Rickon mimicked from Jon arms, always ready to say exactly as their mother said when she was around to hear him and do exactly the opposite everytime she wasn’t looking. 

“We don’t call dibs on women,” Catelyn added, pointing the whisk at Robb with the tone they all hate, the voice of someone so disappointed she couldn’t even make herself yell, “they’re not front seats in a car.”

“Especially when said woman rejected you,” Arya said, wanting to be in the family drama cooking in front of their eyes, finding her way in. 

“She didn’t rejected me per se…” Robb argued half heartedly. 

“She did.” 

“I did,” Daenerys confirmed in a bored tone without looking up from the strawberries she was cutting. 

“you did?” Jon asked right behind her, immensely pleased by this. The amount of girls rejecting Robb Stark were slim to none if his memory from high school served him right. 

Daenerys must have heard something in his question because she looked back at him now, at his smile, shaking her head at the cocky smirk he couldn’t keep away from his lips and she gently pushed him on the arm, mumbling a ‘ _ shut up _ ’ he and Rickon were the only one to hear. 

He leaned over her to steal two strawberries, pushing one into Rickon’s mouth when he opened it to comment on the bad words that came out of Daenerys’ mouth. Jon sat Rickon on the counter beside the bowl, while he added  _ strawberries  _ to Daenerys’ summer scent, to the list of scents clinging to her that was driving him bloody crazy. 

_ Sunshine. Sunscreen. Citrus. Lavender. Whisky. Salt. Sweat. Fire. Sex... Strawberries.  _

Rickon wasn't enough of a barrier to protect him against the slap Daenerys gave on his hand when he tried to steal a new piece of fruit. She made him grunt and Rickon shrieked with laughter. 

“So how do you know each other?” Sansa asked innocently, continuing her line of questioning from earlier, knowing she had better chances at getting answers in the presence of everyone else. 

_ That vindictive little snake.  _

“Because of work?” Ned guested from the breakfast table, as if it was a possible and logical answer. Jon knitted his eyebrows together, not understanding. 

“Work? Why? How?” He fired the questions with his mouth full of new strawberries, looking down at Daenerys, at the smile playing at the corner of her lips, like she knew something he didn’t. 

_ She always knew something he didn’t. _

Arya screamed from her seat, looking at him like he suddenly grew two heads. “Did she hit your head that hard for you to not know who she is?”

“Oh, Arya,” Daenerys started, looking at her with the biggest smile he ever saw on her face, “he was clueless even before the snow globes.” She sighed, as if she was lost in her memory, in that night at the bar, in the flash of recognition he never had while looking at her. “It was pretty amazing,” she whispered only for him, offering him a smile and a new strawberry, her bowl depleting faster than she could cut them. 

“You know absolutely fucking nothing Jon Snow.”

“Arya, langage,” their mother said.

“Why?” he asked, offended, holding his arms out. “Who are you?” he asked toward Daenerys, confused. 

_ With his luck she was his bloody aunt or something.  _

“Oh my gods,” Arya continued with incredulity, “you lived on that piece of ice shit for way too long, Jon. She’s DST!” She said it like he should know what that meant, what her explanation was supposed to mean, who Daenerys was supposed to be. 

“Langage!” 

“ _ Daylight saving time _ ?” he asked, uncertain.

“Daenerys. Stormborn. Targaryen,” Arya specified, taking a dramatic pause between every word she was uttering like he was completely daft. 

_ She spent way too much time with Sansa in recent years and it shows _ . 

“She is the youngest member of congress to be elected in the country to date, she’s running for senate and she will probably be the first woman to become the president of our country!” she said, listing the impressive list of accomplishments, “how did you not know it, you dumbass?!” 

He waited for Daenerys to turn her eyes back on him. She seemed reluctant to do so. There was apprehension in the way she carefully put down her knife on the counter and turned toward him, there was almost sadness in the corner of her eyes when they met his, there was something oddly similar to mourning paint on her face. 

She had wanted the anonymity of him not knowing who she was. 

She had wanted to be just a girl in a bar for a bit. 

She had wanted to  _ not be  _ Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen. 

She had wanted those 1440 more minutes of being strangers. 

The additional day was as much about her than it was about him. 

He smiled at her softly, squeezing her waist gently. “Representative Targaryen,” he said tentatively. Trying the words in his mouth was necessary to test the sound of them, the way they roll on his tongue, out of his mouth. She grunted and almost imperceptibly leaned against him a bit more, her hip cocking back into his hand. “I tried to have a meeting with you actually,” he added, looking back at her. 

“You did?” she asked, squeezing her fingers over the one still at her waist, “when?” 

“He cancelled,” Sansa said in a clipped tone. She was still bitter about it, about the meeting she managed to squeeze in her boss’ schedule as a family favor, about him cancelling and never answering his phone again. 

“And then she cancelled me as a brother,” Jon said. Sansa had been furious at him, swearing left and right she would never do anything else for him. He was positive it was false threats. “It was quite unfortunate,” he said to Daenerys, “I had to turn off my phone that day for 1440 minutes… for personal reasons.” 

_ She  _ had been the one to make him turn his phone off, to make him vanish from his life for one more day, to make him be  _ hers _ for that small window of time. 

“Unfortunate,” she repeated, biting on her bottom lips to refrain from smiling at him. His eyes went to her lips like magnets, nothing could make him look somewhere else than at the pearly teeth biting down on her soft cushion lips. He wanted them for himself. He wanted to bite them, to devour her, drowning on her taste, getting drunk on her scent again. 

“If not at work, how did you even meet then?” Robb asked, curious, his hawk eyes on them, not missing anything. 

Daenerys busied herself with the strawberries again, clearly letting him deal with that conversation. It was a conversation he didn’t want to have. It was something he wanted to keep for himself, to convince himself that Daenerys was  _ his _ . He looked at his mother pleadingly, silently begging her for help, knowing that she just had to say the words and they would leave him alone, at least for a small amount of time. 

“Maybe, we could grill Jon later, when I’m not dying of hunger,” Gendry said, talking for the first time, surprisingly the one to save him. 

Gendry never talked. He mastered the skill of insightful silence with ease, like he was born with it. He never talked if it wasn’t necessary, or if he had nothing to bring to the conversation. He was merely happy with analysing every social situation he saw, never feeling like he should get in and say something irrelevant just to participate. 

He was the opposite of Arya in that regard. Arya always had a way of slytherin her way inside every conversation, every drama, every moment. she was thriving in the middle of chaos.

When spoken, Gendry’s words were important, valued. 

“That’s funny,” Arya snickered, looking at Gendry the same way she looked at Jon earlier, like he was absolutely insane, “you’re defending each other again? I thought you would  _ never _ speak again.” 

She was so fucking dramatic. 

She was throwing in his face the tantrum he had when he found out they were together, when he found out his best friend was sleeping with his favourite sister behind his back for months. 

“Why?” Daenerys asked, looking around, settling her eyes on him and whispering, “Gendry is nice.” As if he didn’t know that. Gendry had been his best friend forever, for as long as he could remember, since way before he was adopted by the Stark and Gendry went with the Seaworth. 

“He decided to sleep with my sister behind my back two years ago,” he explained, keeping his shudders internal for the most part at the memory of it, of him finding out because he walked in on them… no less. 

“I’m pretty sure the decision process was all Arya,” Robb said, snickering. He was probably right about it.  _ Fucking Arya.  _

“Would you have prefered for them to sleep together  _ in front of your face, Udrāzmio?”  _ Daenerys asked matter of fact, confused. 

_ They actually kind of did _ , he thought. “No,” he answered, his voice higher than necessary, his words buried in disgust, “it’s just the principle of things, Daenerys.” 

He didn’t miss the pleased look in her eyes at the sound of her name rolling out of his lips and he wanted to say it again just to watch her close her eyes again like the lids were suddenly too heavy and opened her mouth, a shaky breath thumbling out of her lips.

“Sleeping with your siblings’ best friend... what a family trait,” Sansa added, her eyes never wavering from them. 

“Get over it,” Daenerys told him, ignoring Sansa.  _ Or not _ . The words could as easily apply to her. 

“Thank you!” Arya exclaimed, pointing at Daenerys. 

“It’s the principle of things.” 

“Children! stop bickering and move out of my kitchen,” their mother called over her shoulder, “All of you!” 

Jon was about to make his way to the dining room when Rickon pulled on his arm and shrieked with delight pointing over his head. “Look Jon!” He said, excited, stopping Daenerys with his small and sticky hand, pushing her toward Jon. 

Daenerys stopped and took an unnecessary step toward Jon, bringing her body flushed with him and looking up at his mouth, at his eyes, at something over his head in the kitchen threshold. He followed her gaze to see the green and white mistletoe ball suspended above their head with a red ruban almost as dark as Daenerys’ lipstick the night they met, almost as inviting, almost as promising. 

He was thinking of all the time he wished to kiss her since the night before, of the way he wanted to dragged his lips over any expenses of skin he could find from her collarbone to her jaw, from her navel to her thighs. he was thinking of the way he tried to pulled her in this morning, of the way he kept thinking about breathing her in, swallowing her moan until he couldn’t decipher where she ended and where he began.

_ He wanted to kiss her silly since she hit him on the back of his head with a fucking snow globe.  _

“You know the rules, Jon,” Rickon said. 

“You know the rules,” Daenerys repeated in a whisper. Maybe, just  _ maybe,  _ she had wanted him to kiss her in all of those moments too. Maybe she had waited for him to bring her to him, to burn himself against her, to fly too close to her open flame again. Maybe she had waited for him to make the next step, to walk them to his ruin, to beg again for more. He never had a chance to survive her, to survive Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen. “So, Commander,” She started, getting on her tiptoe to get closer to him, to give him access to her summer scent and her full lips, “are you up for the task, or are you a rule breaker?” 

He would always be up for the task. Kissing her under the mistletoe sounded like the most important of his life at the moment. 

“Commander?” he heard loud and clear, full of disgust behind them, “oh my gods, Daenerys, is  _ Jon _ Commander Hotstuff?” 

Daenerys puffed a laugh against his face, never looking back at Sansa and her outburst surrounded by gagging sound. Daenerys had redness at the top of her cheeks, tinting her face. 

He smiled, his lips almost flushed on hers...  _ she talked about him _ . 

The world around them ceased to exist outside of the cloud of warm breath floating between them, smelling like mint and strawberry. Everything other than the sound of her air getting stuck in her throat was just white noise in his ears. The only thing of importance was the stretching moment before he put his lips on hers, before she let him do it. 

It was almost nothing at first. A caress, no more than a breeze. It was like standing in front of a fire, hands extended towards the flame, close enough to feel the warmth, too far to feel the heat, the burn, the brazier. 

He wanted to put his hand right in those flames and burn himself to the ground. 

He accentuated the pressure of his lips against hers, drinking in the sigh she let go against him, offering her a mute grunt in return, the vibration of it making her fingers closed tighter on the hem of his t-shirt. 

It was sweet, calm, like a reunion, like a wave gently covering a beach, like the end of a moment of solitude. It felt like coming home somehow. 

He kissed her until he couldn’t. He kissed her until the white noise became too loud, until his lungs felt so empty his heart was beating in his rib cage with fury. 

He let go of her with reluctance, searching for something on her face, between her closed eyes and her opened lips, between her hitched breath and her pink cheeks. His thumb was running on the edge of her jaw, sliding on the column of her throat when she opened her lids to look at him under her lashes, like the queen of all sins. 

She pulled on his shirt and crashed against his mouth again. 

The first kiss was for the mistletoe. 

This kiss was for  _ them _ . 

Her lips were searching for more of him, for as much as they could get in the middle of a morning at the kitchen's threshold. She was giving as much as she would take. She was taking as much as she thought she could run away with. Daenerys was pushing her finger in his hair, grasping at any golden strand of memory she could get to weave a new moment between them. 

With her breath in his mouth, he finally felt like they were  _ more  _ than a moment. 

She let him go, breathing air so close from his mouth he could feel the movement on his beard, with eyes so close to his own he could see the specks of deep purple around the blown out pupil of her violet eyes. 

“Hi.”

“Hi,” he whispered back with a smile. 

__

“Explain it to me again,” Daenerys asked in front of him, smiling when he gently got her braid out of her scarf, the silver strands catching the light, casting it around them, almost as bright as the snow, almost as bright as the wall of ice he knew too much and dreaded more and more every time he thought about it. 

They were waiting for the others outside. The breakfast had been as chaotic as any breakfast in the Stark household could get. He had to navigate breakfast with Rickon on his lap, the boy refusing to let him go. Sansa had been disgusted by the newfounded confirmation that whatever she heard about Commander Hotstuff was actually about him and his mother had been delighted by the prospect of them  _ knowing  _ each other. 

He smirked at Daenerys, amused by the way her fingers were fastening his coat, unimpressed by his open zipper and by the way he was going out without anything else then that, letting the wind find its way in without a second thought. She had no idea how warm this was, how cold Always Winter had been.

“We’re going in Wintertown,” he started, lifting his chin to let her zip his coat to the very end, “we have the day to buy the ugliest and useless gift we could find for everyone.” 

“But why?” 

He smiled at her, shrugging his shoulders. He didn’t even know why it became a tradition, an inherent part of their Christmas, of their family time together. He remembered it started with the taky snow globe with the chipped paint, the ugly mistakes like the three eyed raven or the heart tree with the purple leaves instead of the dark red they should be. “I don’t know, it just started with the snow globe” he admitted, “it’s just fun.” And it was. 

“That snow globe is really dear to me,” she said, a smile playing at the corner of her lips and he winced, bringing his hand to his bump at the memory of the dreadful snow globe connecting with his head and the strength behind the blow. She smiled fully at him, forcing a soft black scarf around his neck. 

“You’re a menace, Miss Snow,” he grunted, stepping toward her when she tugged on the scarf, pulling him in with that sparkle in her eyes, full of joy and mischief, full of something he hadn’t seen before her and couldn’t find after her. He barely had any room to take between them, the space was almost filled, but he still wanted to shrink that distance to nothing at all. 

“A tragic menace, remember?” she said, pulling herself up on her tiptoe by his scarf to be eye leveled with him, with no care for that space either, erasing it with a move of her legs. Her minty breath mingled with his own, the heat of her thighs against his was almost unbearable. 

“Didn’t you hear?” he asked, his fingers tracing the knuckles he could feel under her mittens still holding on to the scarf around his neck, holding on to him. He could tell himself that her head was full to the brim with the same exact ideas he had swimming in his own mind, ideas full of her, of molten silver locks on a pillow, of nakedness in the first lights of day, of full lips closing around fingers… of them being nothing less than everything. 

“What?” she asked, incapable of controlling her facial expression, her lifted eyebrow and the open curiosity in her eyes. She wanted to know what he was thinking. She already knew that most of his silences were usually full of screaming thoughts. 

“We are not a tragic love story anymore,” he simply stated, echoing their first conversation, watching her face morphed from curiosity to fonded amusement in seconds. 

“We are not?”

“You and I,” he started, one of his hands travelled from her hand to her elbow, wrapped around it to bring her closer, to feel her forearm against his chest, “we’re a Christmas love story now, Daenerys.” She laughed, her free fingers dancing on his jaw, “there’s nothing tragic about us.” 

“I could find something tragic about anything,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she said with amusement and certainty. 

“Don’t.” 

He had absolutely no doubt about it, about her capacity to find the tragic when there was none, to invent a story that had really nothing to do with them and everything to do with past experiences, to think of the ending before they even turned the first page.

“Is it the point of our story where you bring me to your pittoresque village to help me find my Christmas spirit and show me that life is not all about work?” she cheekily asked, dripping of sarcasm to hide something else, something that sounded almost like hope to his ears. It was in the way the notes of her words got higher in the last syllables, in the way she kept stroking his jaw. 

“And yet again Miss Snow, you misinterpreted my intentions all together,” he answered, his lips hovering over hers, his breath fogging in the cold, melting back on her lips. 

“Let me guess,” she said, licking the droplets of him on her lips, “you want it  _ slow _ ?” 

He shook his head at her, laughing softly. The unendo was there, tuck in between her lips, between the hitched breath he could feel on his mouth. 

He smiled. It was his real smile, the one that showed his teeth, that crinkled the corner of his eyes when it reached it, that made him look like his father even though they had no blood between them. Arya had the same smile too. Their mother simply stated that happiness is a skill that needs to be learned, to be nurtured. They learned happiness as a family, between their father’s smile and their mother’s love. 

He was about to answer that he had no intention to kill her ambition in the name of Christmas when he heard Sansa’s gagging sound in front of them, her finger in her mouth, feigning sickness. “You’re disgusting,” she said, pointing at both of them, incapable of deciding which one of them was the worst for her, “both of you.” 

“I think they’re insanely beautiful together. Disturbingly so,” Arya said to their sister, always taking his side no matter what, always wanting what was best for him. 

“Because you don’t know what I know, Arya!” Sansa shrieked, making Daenerys laugh again, her forehead against his shoulder. 

“She does know a lot,” Danerys said, confirming his earlier suspicions. He couldn’t even bring himself to hide the small amount of cockiness behind his smirk. 

_ She talked about him.  _

“Jon is the worst when it comes to Christmas,” Arya added for Daenerys, kicking the snow in front of her feet, “you’ll actually have to do without the part where he helps you find your Christmas’ spirit.”

“Fuck off! I am amazing at Christmas!” he cried out, offended.

“You missed the last three, Jon,” Arya said, not giving up, “you suck at Christmas.” 

He frowned at her, his fingers twitching around Daenerys’ elbow. He refused to suck at Christmas. But the last three Christmas he spent on his own, alone in a cold room at Always Winter, choosing to stay away, choosing to isolate himself, as if he didn’t need the last push from his family, the last disappointed stares to convince him he wasn’t happy where he was, proved that she was right and he sucked at it. 

He knew. He was trying his damn best to ignore it, to ignore the fact he would have to go back North, back where he couldn’t find himself anymore. 

“You’re thinking too loud again,” Daenerys said, her nose tracing the shell of his ear. “It’s okay, you’re  _ alright  _ at sucking,  _ Udrāzmio _ …  _ olvie sȳz _ ,” she whispered, sucking the lobe of his ear between her lips. He could feel her smile when he grunted, a low sound coming from his throat. He hoped it was low enough to keep it between them. 

“A menace,” he whispered, repeating himself, feeling like it needed to be said again. 

“Come on now, Jon,” she said, stepping back to look at him with a smile. He was mourning her heat as soon as she let air come close to him, as soon as she stepped back, leaving the space between them full of nothing, empty. “What happens if we find everything really fast?” 

“What do you mean?” he asked, stirring her toward his Range Rover.

“If we found the ugliest gifts imaginable within the first hour, what would happen?” she asked again, hinting at something he couldn’t grasp. “Could you offer me that second drink we never get around to have?” she suggested, pink at the top of her cheeks. 

“Daenerys, are you asking me on a date?” he asked with a grin so wide, he was sure his face would crack from it. 

“No,” she scuffed at the idea of it, “I am telling you I would say yes if  _ you  _ ask.” 

“Alright,” he whispered, opening the door for her. 

“Disgusting,” Sansa mumbled behind them, sliding inside the car, “absolutely disgusting.” 

__

They had run across town, visiting Winter Street and all of its gift shops faster than he ever did in his life, helping each other find the most useless and ugliest gifts they could find. She marvelled at the idea of a street exclusively composed of christmas’ gift shop and decorations. They were fast enough for him to ask her on a date, to ask her to sit on a bench while he got the spiced hot cocoa from the Wildling’s café, to tell her stories about everyone they see, to just sit with her in the cold for hours and look at the snow trying to resist melting around her. 

It was nearly impossible. 

At some point, she swung her legs across his, bent at the knee. She was looking at him like nobody had ever looked at him before, with no guards, no filter around her emotions, her needs or her desires. He wanted her to never stop looking at him this way. She was cradling her third hot chocolate on her bent knee. He was absentmindedly drawing circles and snow flakes on her legs, her black thighs were thin enough for him to feel her heat radiating against the tip of his fingers, like flames licking around his hand. 

“What about her?” she asked, her chin pointing toward a disheveled woman, croupling under what seemed to be dozens of bags. 

“That’s Ros,” he said looking at the woman in front of them, “every year, she gets a Christmas present for every woman her husband cheated with.” 

Daenerys looked at him, laughing in her cup, bubbles of hot cocoa coming out of it. “You’re lying!” she said, slapping his arm, looking at the woman again. 

“No,” he assured, a laugh stuck in his throat, “They all testified for her when she asked for a divorce. She got everything.” 

“That bastard probably deserved it,” she said, her hand involuntarily going toward her throat and her ex-fiances finger printed on it, hiding behind a turtleneck dress and a fluffy scarf. 

“I think she orchestrated it before they married. She always said she would marry rich,” he answered honestly, looking at Ros, never having it in her to look the part she wanted in her own life. She always looked like a hot mess, nothing like the lady she was always trying to be, picking on Sansa for looking more put together than she ever did. “Is it still bothering you?” he asked without precision. He didn’t need to give her one, the stillness of her hand around her throat showed him that she knew exactly what he meant. 

“No,” she answered honestly, bringing her hand back on his jaw, curling her fingers, scratching his beard lazily. “He was mad at me for succeeding where he failed, for having ambitions higher than being his trophy wife,” she started, taking a breath without looking at him, “with retrospect, I should get a Christmas gift to every woman he cheated with, to every woman he felt he could dominate. We broke up a year ago.” 

“How did that happen, if you broke up a year ago” he asked, running his finger across the purplish mark she hid on her cheek and across the softness of her scarf over her neck. 

“I didn’t miss him,” she simply said, like it was reasons enough to explain everything, reasons enough to close his hands around her neck. “I didn’t crumble and my career didn’t fall apart when he stopped being by my side. How dare I go on with my life?” She looked at him and shrugged the last part, like it was a question that didn’t really deserved an answer, like it was a stupid question dipped in patriarchy and nonsense. 

“I’m sorry, Dany” he said. There was nothing else to say, to do than apologize for something that had nothing to do with him. 

“I thought you didn’t want to be my friend,” she said at the mention of her name, with shadows dancing in her violet eyes, like sadness and regrets, like something he said. 

_ He didn’t want to be her friend.  _

“I don’t want to be your friend,” he confirmed. He wanted more, he had always wanted more as soon as he saw her in the bar, as soon as he was transfixed by the red print of her lips on her glass. He was gone from the beginning. “But I would be comfortable moaning that name too,” he said with a small quirk of the corner of his lips, trying to remember what was the name he moaned that first time, remembering exactly the tone she had when she moaned ‘Udrāzmio’ for the first time, his face buried between her legs. 

“Good,” she said, laughing, looking at him over her paper cup.

He didn’t see her lips, but he saw her smile falter in her eyes. They opened up bigger, no longer obstructed by her high cheekbones and her big smile. “It was true what I said back then, Jon,” she said in a whisper, like the words were too big to pass her closed up throat, like she didn’t necessarily want to say them outloud. 

He didn’t ask what she meant. Part of him didn’t really want to know, part of him already knew she would tell him anyway. He waited, looking at her, at the broken softness in her eyes.

“I will disappoint you,” she said in a choking sound, her hand no longer traveling around the angle of his jaw, no longer touching him. He opened his mouth to talk but she shook her head, holding a finger up. her sudden silence didn’t mean that she was done, that she had said what she had to say. it just meant that she was struggling to find the air to provide the words. “I do have daddy issues,” she started, gripping her paper cup with both hands, “and I do put my work first.” 

“Am I supposed to fault you for that?” he asked sincerely. 

“You will,” she answered, her words like steel, like truth that have been proven to her over and over again, without fault, by so many people she wasn’t even entertaining the idea they could be wrong. 

“I won’t” he answered with the same steel lacing his words. “Weren’t you exactly that when we met?” 

“We were never meant to be more,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she reminded him. Their encounter in the bar in Dragonstone was supposed to be an interlude, a moment in their life that was never supposed to be extended. He was supposed to get over it as soon as he left. “We were meant to be temporary,” she continued, “ a quick moment in time, nothing more.” 

“There was nothing quick about it,” he reminded her, enjoying the eyeroll, the push of his arm and the smile she was trying to hide behind her cup, the red lips too prestine for his taste, the hair too perfect. 

_ He wanted to mess her up.  _

“I wanted to be  _ more _ even before we left that bar,” he admitted nonchalantly, like it was the easiest thing to say, “Whoever made you believe that ambitious women are somehow damaged and disappointing is an asshole, Dany.” 

There was a flame ignited in her eyes, something he couldn’t name properly, something bigger than his words, but still smaller than this moment. “If we are a Christmas story, aren’t you supposed to convince me to leave everything behind to run away with you in your ranch somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere?” she asked, not succeeding at infusing her words with humour instead of the insidious doubt he could hear. 

"Misinterpreting my intentions,” he said with a click of his tongue against his teeth, his hand closing tighter on her knee, “again.” He smiled at her to soften the harshness he wasn’t able to get out of his voice, to soften anything anyone had ever told her.

“Tell me what they are then” she asked, her fingers finding their way back to him, to his neck, curling under the hem of his coat, under the scarf. They were cold. 

Nothing about her should be cold. 

“I have no intentions to subdue your ambition, Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen, youngest member of congress, soon to be senator and first woman to ever become president of Westeros,” he said seriously, listing the same things Arya said earlier, his eyes never leaving hers, pulling on her legs to bring her closer, leaning his forehead on hers, ignoring her snort, “I think your drive and ambition is sexy.” 

“That’s because you experienced it only when the thing i wanted was you,” she laughed, puffing air in his face, smelling like chocolate and candy canes. 

“Sexy indeed.”

He smiled at her, wondering how he could still find some hint of summer scent behind the chocolate and the peppermint, how he could still smell sunshine and citrus, sunscreen and lavender. 

“I know what you are not intended to do,” she murmured, her words reverberating against his open lips, “I still don’t know what your intentions are, Jon Snow. Maybe you should explain them to me… in great details.” There was something wicked about the way she said the last word, something that conjured the image of him biting her ass, licking his way to her orgasm, her cunt vibrating around his tongue, her juices all over his lips and chin. 

She knew exactly what she was doing to him. 

“To make you incapable of going back to your life without thinking of me every minute of it, of course,” he answered truthfully, with humour to disguise the honesty of his answer into something  _ less _ while he just wanted something  _ more _ . 

“Of course.” 

He looked at her, at her eyes traveling from his eyes to his mouth, back and forth like she couldn’t decide where to look first, like she couldn’t decide which part of him could answer the next question, give the next move. 

“You have chocolate here,” he whispered, his thumb running across her lower lips, dragging the red lipstick, messing her up like he wanted too, his mouth hovering over hers. 

“No I don’t,” she said knowingly, sticking her tongue out to lick the tip of his thumb. 

“No you don’t,” he admitted.

“In that big Christmas romance of ours,” she started, so close that her lips were brushing against him, “do we always need excuses to make out? Mistletoe, hot chocolate—”

He cut her off by breathing her in, jumping in the furnace of her mouth, lining the roof of her mouth with his tongue, tasting every corner of if in a hungry kiss. He didn’t care about the public bench, about the way Old Nan was probably flipping out behind her windows. He cared even less, when Daenerys moaned between his lips, meeting him lips for lips, tongue for tongue, teeth for teeth, breath for breath. 

She lost her fingers in his curls, pulling him against her in a clash of teeth and a symphony of breath. She dropped her paper cup, splashing hot chocolate on their legs, and they ignored the small burn and the liquid seeping through their clothes, concentrating on the burn starting between their lips. 

His own hands closed around the nape of her neck. He knew nothing… except the fact he was certain he would not be the first one to let go. 

**Then**

Heat. Comfort. Stickiness. 

That was the only thing he could feel. He was draped in muted heat, weighing down on him like a heavy blanket with soft edges, like a woman's body with silky skin. Their bodies were sticking together with dried out bodily fluid; sweat, saliva and cum, leaving a heavy scent in the room, a heavy feeling of pleasure and satisfaction.

Jon looked down at the woman draped around him. He was surprised to see her awake, to see her big violet eyes on him, unwavering, her face surrounded by a halo of moonlight hair catching every bit of morning light they could. She smiled slowly from her spot, her chin propped up on one hand while her fingers kept bending slowly, while her nails kept scratching at his seams, threatening to let his inside pool around them. 

_ That’s why he woke up.  _

“Hi,” he said with a rough voice, a rough northern burr lining the inside of his throat, incapable of getting any other words out. 

“Good morning,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she whispered, pushing her lips against his sticky skin, exhaling hot air, making him grunt and swear, “I was waiting for you to wake up.” 

“Fuck,” he said, his hands lost in the thickness of her hair, in the mess he made of them… multiple time last night, in the knots he weaved with his fingers. “Good morning indeed,” he mumbled, her tongue tracing his contour like a damn drawing, like she was writing her name with her tongue on him, on his chest, on his scars. 

“Does it still hurt?” she asked, her breath ricocheted on his skin, on the surface of a rigged scar splatter on his chest. One of many. 

“I can’t feel anything,” he assured her. He couldn’t feel any of his wounds, not the knives, not the shrapnel, not the shotguns. He couldn’t feel anything he got past what felt like his fourth life. 

“Anything?” she asked, covering one of his scars with the flat of her tongue, engulfing his adonis belt with lava and fire, scraping off her own saliva with her teeth. He moaned deeply, her mouth travelling toward another scar across his abdominal muscle. “Are you sure?” she asked, “can’t you feel that, Commander?” It was a rhetorical question he wasn’t in a position to answer. 

She nipped and bit, licked and kissed with her opened mouth, making him feel everything, making every fucking nerves on his body converged to his chest, to his cock throbbing, trapped between him and the soft skin of her chest, almost to her collar bone. If she could just run her tongue up his chest, his cock would be nestled in the heat between her breasts. 

He could feel absolutely fucking everything. her tongue. Her lips. Her teeth. 

As if she could read his thoughts, she moved up his chest slowly, dragging a wet path across the extent of his chest, her eyes locked on him, smirking at his shallow breath and muffled sound. She brought her arms closer together, pushing her breast together, caging his cock between them, never stopping the movement of her mouth on his scars. 

“I’m pretty sure you feel that,” she continued, humming, breathing, licking, biting… driving him completely insane. “And that,” she added, moving down, making him moan insanities, his cock still trapped between her breasts. She bent her head, kissing the tip of his cock with an open mouth when it grazed her lips before moving up again, flicking her tongue against the head. 

“Aye,” he whimpered, not moving, but out of breath, “I can feel that.” 

He brought himself up on his elbows to look down at her, to have a better view of her sinful mouth leaving wet trails on his chest, of her curtain of silver hair pushed on one side, of the tip of his dick coming out of its fleshy cage. She pushed him down flat on the bed, “don’t mess with my angle, Commander,” she demanded, biting down on one of his niple, licking the sting away with the flat of her tongue when he grunted from the satisfying pain. 

She moved up and down, her mouth and tongue battling on two fronts; his chest and his shaft, his scars and the tip of his cock. He mumbled a litany of words he couldn’t decipher himself, fisting the sheet on either side of him, pushing his hips up to meet her, to try and trespass the barrier of her lips to reach the moist heat of her mouth. 

“Commander.” 

She said it like a question, like he had no other choice then to look down at her again, then to watch her dripping lips move against the head of his dick. 

_ He was going to fucking die from this.  _

She smiled, the movement of her lips making his dick throbbed for more. She reached for one of his hands, untangling his fingers from the sheets and tangling them back on the hair she gathered in a messy ponytail for him to hold. He felt all his muscles constricted in anticipation, knowing what this meant, knowing what a bloody perfect morning this will be. 

“ _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she repeated, obviously waiting for him to respond, to form some sort of coherent words, to form sentences that made senses. 

“Hum?” he managed, his throat almost completely closed off, his brain too preoccupied at restraining himself from shoving his cock in her mouth. 

“I want to suck that cock now, if you don’t mind?” She ended the sentence like a question, like he would have anything to protest that perfect plan of hers. 

He opened his lips to answer, to say anything that could convince her to continue, but any words morphed into a long plaintive moan when she moved down his body, licking his cock from the base to the head, her thumb following the same path, he teeth and her blunt nail lightly scratching the frenulum attaching his foreskin, sending a shiver down his body and a hiss breath out of his mouth. He involuntarily jerked, pulling slightly at her hair. He was about to apologize when her moan vibrated on her lips, on his cock. 

_ She goddamn moaned. _

She licked the precum at the tip before closing her mouth around his head, down his shaft. She was sucking, licking, grazing with her teeth, taking one inch at a time, slowly, her tongue flat against his velvety shaft. 

He hit the back of her throat and she swallowed him down and kept going until he felt like her mouth and throat were filled to the brim with his cock, until she choked around it, moving up again, her tongue trailing behind, liberating his cock with an obscene wet pop, strand of saliva connecting her lips to it, breathless, her eyes were swimming pools of strained tears. 

She was a vision, a carefully imagined wet dream, something completely out of reach, but somehow still wrapped around his cock. 

“The hair,” she said, out of breath, puffing small bubbles of breath on his wet cock, pushing her hand on top of the one he had wrapped on her hair, “use it.” 

It was a demand again. A surrender of control while she was still holding all the power. She sucked him back in her mouth, going down faster than the first time. He closed his fingers tighter around her messy locks, pushing her down on his cock, lifting his hips up, trusting in her mouth, feeling every vibration of her moan. 

She swallowed him down her throat, bobbing her head up and down, choking around him, taking every push of his hand on her hair, every trust of his hips filling her mouth. She hummed around him, making his eyes roll to the back of his head, his breath hitched in his throat, beginning every movement over and over again : swallowing, bobbing, choking. Repeat. 

He could feel the familiar tightening of his balls, the pressure at the base of his spine. 

“Love,” he said as a warning, pulling at her hair, using every restrain he had to give her enough time to move off his dick before he came. She hummed again, her nails sinking in the side of his hips, sliding under his ass to keep him deep in her throat. 

“Fuck, Daenerys,” he grunted, moaning around her name a dozen times, repeating it with more fervor each time, the spur of his cum hitting the back of her throat, sliding down with every swallowed motin. She let him go, kissing and licking any remnant of him on the sensitive tip of his cock, making him hished her name, his fingers pulling on her hair with the small energy he had left in him. 

He closed his eyes and she licked her way back to his face, open mouth kisses, pool of saliva and swipes of warm tongue. He opened his eyes only when he could feel her nose against his, her lips hovering on top of his. He got lost in the violet of her eyes, in the spec of lilac, in the scent of him lingering on her lips. 

“Good morning,  _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she repeated against his lips, a fire cave ready to crash on him, engulfed him, burned him to the ground and more. 

He brought her to him with the hand still knotted in her hair, crashing his lips against her, taking every bit of himself against his tongue, melding their scent and their taste. He lazily kissed her, his lips out of sync, his brain out of power, all his body parts out of will. 

“Commander?” she murmured against his lips in those sinful notes of hers, her fingers dancing in his curls, moving to run her thumb on the edge of his jaw. 

“Fuck, Miss Snow, give me a minute,” he mumbled, making her laugh a puff of air on his lips, making him shiver even if he was everything but cold. 

“Okay,” she agreed, moving her lips to the corner of his lips, joining her hands at the edge of his jaw, down his neck, all over the tendon of his neck, the trapezius muscle connecting to his shoulder. 

_ Fuck.  _

She moved back up, taking the same road in reverse order until she was flush with his lips again, breathing him in, giving him no time to recover from her  _ at all.  _ “Jon?” she asked again, using his name, nipping at his lips. 

“Yes?”

“I want one more day,” she whispered, her lips a breath away from him, her eyes never leaving his. 

One day. She’s asking for one more day. 

_ He wanted more than a day, more than the crumbs they were leaving behind.  _

She was holding on on everything she decided last night, losing her grip on her decisions. He could see in her eyes she wanted more too, limiting herself to that additional day, to the hope that she would be satisfied with this. 

He’ll make sure she would never be satisfied with one more day. 

She was already blurring the line she traced sharply between them. She blurred it when she gave him her name, when she went to sleep her face in the crook of his neck, her breath in his curls. She blurred it when she let herself ask for one last day like she wanted to sharpen the memory of them, like she couldn’t hold on to her own resolve. 

“Or—” he started to offer, unable to finish his sentence with her mouth crashing on his, cutting any protest he could come up with. 

“Don’t,” she said, crashed on his lips, shaking her head, stopping his protest, refusing to let him ask for even more. “Tragic, remember?” she added, choking a little on the two words. 

“Okay,” he said, moving his hand from her hair to her back, rounding her ass cheek with the tip of his finger. 

_ He was taking the crumbs they were leaving behind.  _

“Okay,” she repeated, a relieved smile tucking her lips up, making her look younger, less of a beautiful mess even with her messy hair, her smudge mascara and the red lipstick stain around her lips. 

_ She was the most beautiful sight he ever had the chance to look at. _

She got up, cursing under her breath when she took her first step out of the bed, the ghost of them still throbbing between her legs after hours of sleep. He laughed, watching her move, watching the sway of her hips, the shape of her ass, the miles of legs she possesses for such a tiny person. She rummaged through their clothes, opening her velvet clutch from last night. 

She climbed back on the bed, on top of him, two phones clutched in her hands. “Turn it off,” she said, extending his phone to him, “you are all mine for the next 1440 minutes. We stop existing for anything else. We disappear for a day.” 

“1440 minutes?” he asked. 

“1440 minutes,” she confirmed with a soft move of her head, her own phone turned off and discarded on her nightstand. 

He turned off his phone, ignoring the missing call from Sansa, the text messages from Edd and Sam, waiting for the screen to turn black for the next 24 hours, waiting to take advantage of all the minutes she was willing to give him, hoping to convince her to give him more. 

“Let’s make the most of it then,” he said against her lips, running his thumb across her cheek bone, down her face, around her neck, holding her to him, feeling her smile, hinaling her sigh in his mouth, taking every fucking minute in front of them. 

She whimpered when she felt his cock twitch under her, detaching her mouth from his, sitting down, straddling his hips, digging her nails right below his collar bones, racking them down his chest to his abs, leaving red indentation on his skin. She played with the contour of his abs, tracing them again and again, as if she didn’t already learn every ridges, every bumps, every scars of them last night.

He groaned again when she moved, her heat against his still sensitive cock, enveloping it, her need and her juices pooling around it, making her slide easily against him, her fingers still digging their way through his abs. 

“I think—” she started, catching her breath when one of his hands travelled up her side, his thumb flicking a nipple, “—I think I could come, just riding your abs, Commander.” 

“Fuck.” 

His fingers digged deeper in the soft skin of her side, bringing her forward, feeling her mess travel from his dick to his stomach, feeling the ember of her cunt burn its way through his abs. He relished in the way she closed her eyes and opened her mouth in a silent cry, throwing her hair back enough for him to grab it again to keep her like that, to keep her breast arched toward him, to keep her creamy throat on display, like an offer. 

_ Fuck.  _

“Let’s try it,” he said with a hoarse voice. She was grinding on his abs, making a mess of him like he loved making a mess of her. His free hand travelled down to her clit, to the bundle of nerve he merely grazed, adding pressure around it, feeling her wetness, watching her moan go up her throat and out of her mouth. 

He could feel her shook her head, her hair still trapped in the grip of his hand, rolled around his fist. “No,” she said, her head still thrown back before he let go of his grip, before she plunged her eyes in his again, before he drowned in them one more time, “I  _ need  _ to come with your cock inside of me,  _ Udrāzmio _ .” 

“Fuck,” he cursed, closing his eyes, repeating himself, finding his vocabulary lacking diversity when she was grinding on his abs, asking for his cock inside of her looking like fire and sin made flesh with his thumb rounding around her clit. 

With a quick move of his hips, he brought her under him, pinning her body between him and the mattress, eating up her whimper, licking his way to her breast, catching the erected nipple between his lips, between his teeth, teasing her. His hand never left her clit, never stopped making pleasure come out of her lips in short breaths. 

She lifted her hips slightly to bring him between her legs, to courcircuit his brain in a simple roll of hips, in a simple shift of her fingers on his ass. His cock was already throbbing, nestled between her folds. “Udrāzmio,” she whimpered, pushing his hand away towards the condoms somewhere on the bed..

He rummaged through the foil paper littering the bed, looking for an unopened one, cursing under his breath for the minutes he was wasting with her, even if he currently had her legs closed in a vise grip around him, playing with his resolve, bringing the head of his cock to her entrance, making him want nothing more than to push more. 

“Fuck love, we need to—” he started, going black when the hand on his ass tried to bring him closer somehow, “—I need to—” 

He let his head fall in the crook of her neck, breathing hard, biting on her shoulder. “I know,” she mumbled, her lips flush against his ear, her voice wavering. She didn’t know. If she knew, she would still her movements, she would know he was about to snap, he was about to lose the few strands of control he still had over himself. “Be quick about it,” she urged, taking another inch of him, making him blow hot curses against her already damp skin, searching frantically for a condom. 

“Shit, shit, shit,” he mumbled until he closed his fingers around an unopened foil packet, trying his damn best to ignore the pain whimper that escape her mouth when he came out of her to put the condom on before thrusting in again, swallowing her surprise cry in his mouth. 

Every fucking time he was burried in her, he felt like he found a piece of puzzle, a clue for a scavenger hunt where the treasure would always be her. every time it felt like he should have never left her cunt in the first place. 

“ _ Udrāzmio _ ,” she moaned. It was a supplication, a prayer, a welcome. 

He moved from the crook of her neck to her face, breathing air around her lips, exchanging mumbled nonsense wrapped in moans and grunts. She held her legs tighter around his waist, bringing him in with her feet, with the hands firmly gripping his ass, bringing him deeper, arching her body higher with every thrust. 

He traced her lips with his tongue, chasing her moan, searching for his name thumbling out of her lips, closing his teeth around her chin, dragging them down her neck, on the pulse point she was offering with a whimper. 

Her nails were scratching every expense of him they could find, from his ass to his back, from his shoulder to his scalp, dragging fire trails on everything she touched. He sucked on the tender skin under her ear and savored the soft weep of his name coming out of her almost as much as he reveled in the guttural cry she made when he moved back to bring one of her legs over his shoulder, grazing her clit with every shallow thrust. 

Jon took one of her hands to his mouth, sucking on two digits, swirling his tongue around each one, “Touch yourself,” he demanded letting go of her fingers, hearing a whimper he wasn’t sure came from him or from her, not caring about the answer. 

She complied, bringing her wet fingers to her clit in the same motion she showed him the night before, the same pace, the same pressure, crying out when his thrust accentuated the pressure of her fingers against herself. 

“That’s it, love, come for me,” he said, encouraging, his lips against the skin of her ankle. Nipping, kissing, licking. 

“ _ Iksan māzis _ .” She whined the familiar world, thrashing around the mattress, biting her lower lips to keep her from crying out, her cunt fluttering around him, clamping down on him, making him see black. 

With a swipe of his thumb he freed her lips from her teeth to hear her cry his name, to hear her short breath catch in her throat and her long wail of pleasure bring him to the edge, her cunt pulsating around him, milking everything he had to give. 

He came in shuddering waves, in an orchestra only composed of her name, going back in the crook of her neck, riding his orgasm in the smell of their storm sticking to her skin. 

It was the first minutes of the 1440 she gave him, the first moments she allowed him to have and he enjoyed it like he didn’t know he wanted more, like he didn’t know he would beg for more at the door of her house the next morning, like he didn’t know she would refuse him with a silent sob stuck in her throat, like he didn’t know he would leave on a plane the next day, mourning everything about her from her scent to her laugh, from her smile to her mess, from her captivating beauty to her body wrapped around him. 

His nose buried in her damp hair, breathing their scent on her skin, he enjoyed the moment like he didn’t know he would have to crack himself open the next morning just to be able to say goodbye. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Valyrian : 
> 
> olvie sȳz -- Very good


	3. The Kind of Love That Doesn't Break Your Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! 
> 
> Chapter 3 is here, I hope you'll enjoy this new part in the adventure of Commander Hotstuff and his Alysanne Snow! 
> 
> I know that Christmas is over, but it's the beauty of writing and reading I think ... not to be stuck in the here and now! 
> 
> This is a little bit of a monster so I am sorry !! Small amount of angst in there too. 
> 
> As always, thank you to my Beta Hayl who deal with my sorry ass all the time and love me anyway! 
> 
> Comments make my day if you ever feel so inclined to make me happy! Of course, I will forever love every single one of you anyway for reading! it means a lot! thank you !

**Now**

Daenerys leaned over the centre console of the Range Rover, tugging on her seat belt to get on her knees to get herself closer to him; close enough to see the white specs in his eyes when he quickly looked at her, like snowflakes permanently printed in the grey of his iris, close enough to push her cold nose against his jaw and make him flinch, close enough to smell her own shampoo in his curls, the scent mixed with his own; pine trees with a side of lavender. 

It made her smile. “Tell me where we are going,” she whispered again, planting her lips on the edge of his jaw and tracing the contour of his ear with the tip of her nose. 

“I will crash this car, Daenerys,” he warned, chancing a glance toward her, “and in this position you will die.” 

She snorted at him, her eyes fixed on the ghost of a smile playing at the corner of his lips. Jon Snow had a myriad of different smiles and this one was at the top of her list. It was the smile he was trying to hide because of her, because of something she said or because of something she did. It was soft, barely there, still blindingly lighting up his eyes with small lines around them. She loved that smile. It was an _almost smile_ that seemed to have her name on it, that seemed to exist _for her._

“Just tell me,” she pleaded. He knew she wasn’t above begging him. 

“I didn’t tell you where we were going the last 348 times you asked,” he remarked, pushing her back in her seat, adjusting the seat belt around her, “I won’t tell you now.” 

She pouted at him for the shortest minute that ever existed on the surface of this planet. He took her hand in his, intertwining their fingers, his rough skin marked with experiences and life weaved with her smooth skin, weakened by acids and pleasantries. He ran the flat tip of his thumb against the length of her own, slowly, with care. 

Her breath caught in her throat before she could push it out of her lips. Every move he made felt charged, from the way he put his lips on top of the red print on the edge of her whisky glass to the tip of the fingers he ran on her naked back, from the flat of his tongue tracing every fold of her cunt to his fingers firmly pushing her against a window, from the push of his hand knotted in her hair to the delicate nip of his lips on hers, from the smile she could feel against her temple to the content breath lost in her neck. Every move he ever made was charged with a promise … _to her._

No one has ever made a promise so tempting than every move he made. 

He brought their hands to his mouth, brushing his lips on every knuckle, tugging them open on every single line of her hand, puffing air against her skin. She couldn’t recall a most erotic moment involving hands in recent memory. “Smooth motherfucker,” she mumbled, her eyes never leaving his lips. 

He laughed against her hand, kissing her skin more firmly before resting their joined hands on her thigh, running the back of his hand on her leg, his fingers extending to her other leg, brushing against her, tantalizingly. She brought her legs together, giving him access to more, incapable to ever stop giving him part of her that she wished could live forever in his hands until they die in them.

She hid her smile, looking out the window, looking at the dark nights still dancing in front of them, tugging at every bubble of energy she had left not to fall back asleep. 

“You can go back to sleep for a bit,” he said, his fingers still drawing on her legs, not even looking at her, just knowing somehow she was fighting a yawn, fighting a nap, “we’ll be there in less than 30 minutes.” He had woken her up an hour prior, in the middle of the night with his hands on her hair and his breath on her face, demanding she gets dressed without asking any question. 

She got dressed. But she asked a million questions. 

“No,” she said looking back at him with a smile, running her other hand on his forearm, not adding the other words that wanted to stumble out of her mouth. _No, she didn’t want to sleep and miss any minute of him. No, she didn’t want to sleep when she could take the time to count the heartbeat pulsing on his wrist. No, she didn’t want to sleep when she could use the time to fill her brain with images of him and her lungs with every single one of his exhales._

They spent the last part of the journey in silence, the silence broken only for the occasional question about their destination and the occasional reminder he would not cave in and tell her. Even their silences were filling the space, searching each other, mingling together. It was warm. Comfortable. 

He parked the car on the side of a hangar that seemed big enough to host one or three dragons. The hangar was in the middle of nowhere, the snow around them was covering every surface the dark night wasn’t claiming, making it look like there was nothing else around them, making it look like it was the only thing there in the middle of a complete white out. 

“Where are we?” She asked him before he jumped out of the car to come over and open her door. Outside, she turned on herself to look around, enjoying the cold air in her lungs and the crunch of the snow under her boots. 

She looked at him over her shoulder, her breath catching in her throat at the vision of him, at the way he tugged on her hand to bring her flush against him, at the way he smiled down at her after looking out at the hangar. 

“Let me show you,” he said, his voice barely above the sound of the wind catching in the trees she couldn’t yet see around them. 

She had never seen this smile before. She took it in, registering every detail of it. It was childish; like the smile of a child in front of a chocolate cake or a mountain of presents under the tree on Christmas morning. It was fitting at this exact moment, in the first hours of Christmas Day. He was smiling with all his face, like life never hurt him before, like this smile couldn’t remember what pain felt like. 

She laughed, incapable of bottling up everything this smile made her feel. 

_She felt happiness … like life never hurt her before, like she couldn’t remember what pain felt like._

“Get your small motherfucking ass in here Crow, so I can go the fuck back to sleep,” a booming voice said from the rusty door of the hangar. 

They looked at the man at the same time, getting two different reactions; Jon laughed with recognition while Daenerys smiled with curiosity at the giant frame clad in a simple shirt despite the biting cold, with red flaming hair sticking out of place in every direction. 

“I know you were not even in bed yet, Tormund, neglecting your wife as always,” Jon said to the man—Tormund, walking toward him, lifting one of his arms to offer the half-hug/back-slap men seemed to prefer to greet each other.

Tormund, however, decided to crush Jon to his chest, lifting him from the ground, planting the noisiest kiss she ever heard right on his mouth, laughing at the roar of protest from Jon. “You look prettier every time I see you, Crow,” he said with a shit-eating grin. 

“For fuck’s sake, Tormund,” Jon said, pushing at the giant man, sounding annoyed if it wasn’t for the smile on his own face. He looked back at her, at her hand he never dropped, “Daenerys this is Tormund Giantsbane, a _giant_ pain in the ass, Tormund, this is Daenerys—,”

“—Daenerys Stormborn _Fucking_ Targaryen,” he interrupted with glee, ready to crush her to him like he did with Jon, making her shriek out a laugh, “Dragon Queen!” 

“Hi, Mr. Giantsbane,” she said as soon as he put her on the ground, making her rock a bit with dizziness, not missing Jon’s confused look at the new nickname, “nice to meet you.” 

“None of that shit! Call me Tormund,” He said, booming like the man never had to use a quieter voice in his life, slamming his hand on her shoulder and pointing his thumb at Jon, “This man calls me babe.”

“I really don’t.” 

“He’s lying,” Tormund simply stated, like he was used to it, like he was used to Jon being difficult. Jon had a similar dynamic with Robb; full of loving banter, professions of love and halfass protests over them. “I am the love of his life,” Tormund told her, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at her, making her laugh again at Jon’s expense. 

“He did call me Love the first day we met,” she said, winking at Jon when she heard him grunt, “didn’t know my name.” 

“Really, Crow?”

“Am I the _only_ person in the world not knowing who you are?” he asked her, pushing Turmond’s hand from her shoulder, replacing it with his own, squeezing gently before moving up to the underside of her ear, staying only a couple of seconds before going back to her shoulder, just enough to make her falter. 

“Of course not,” she answered heavily, puffing a laugh as Tormund answered at the same time, stating the opposite. 

“Yes.” 

She looked back at Jon, smiling, smoothing out the creases between his brows with the tip of her finger, “I loved how clueless you were, _Udrāzmio_ ,” she whispered to him, reminding him how refreshing it felt for her to be a stranger, a nobody, a girl in a bar … so ordinary, she could be wanted only for herself for once instead of what she had always represented.

She never felt more like somebody than when she was nobody in the eyes of a stranger with grey eyes printed with light specks of snowflakes. 

Jon took her hand to bring it down from his forehead, to kiss the tip of her fingers, to bring her to the present, to the place she left the strangers behind, to the moment she decided she could still be someone if he continued to look at her that way, like the only things he expects of her were things she was willing to give to him in a heartbeat. 

“Good for you, Crow,” Tormund crooned in their ears, bending the knees to be at the same height as them, the shit-eating grin still in place, “Now tell me which one you need, to get laid.” 

Daenerys stopped paying attention after Jon cursed him off again, after another booming laugh and after they started using terms she didn’t understand, it sounded like highly specific codes she had no use to. 

_OH-58 Kiowa Warrior. MH-6 Little Bird._

The only thing she knew was that they must have been talking about a plane or a helicopter. She looked around her, at the multitude of aircraft in the hangar, small and big ones, all of them black as night with the black on black crest of the Night’s Watch, a matte crow on top of a glossy shield, making her think of silky black strips on top of the black shoulder pads of a uniform, of him fucking her still clad in said uniform. 

“Where are we?” she asked again loud enough for him to understand, not looking back at the both of them, still scanning all the aircraft around them. 

“Tormund is an aircraft mechanic for the Night’s Watch,” Jon started, getting interrupted by the giant red head. 

“—I am not working for the Night’s Watch, Crow.” 

“I don’t see any other aircraft, but ours in here, man,” Jon said, a playful smile tugging on his lips, like he just knew how much he could rille him up by insinuating he could work for the Night’s Watch. 

“Because normal people are careful with their gear, fucker. They aren’t all like you flying like cowboys-fighter-fucking-pilot-from-the-seventh-hells,” Turmond said pointing an accusing finger at Jon, making him laugh at the accusation, tacitly accepting that his friend was telling the truth, making her feel uneasy about the next step, about the _real_ possibility Jon was taking her in one of those aircraft. “I’m out of here, lock up when you’re done,” Tormund said before telling her goodbye, wingling his eyebrow at Jon, cheekily asking them to name their first-born after him. 

Daenerys looked at Jon expectedly, waiting for him to join her next to the biggest helicopter she had ever seen, waiting for him to invade her personal space again and make the air around them smell like him and her, like pine trees and lavender. “The Night’s watch sends all the aircraft here when they need repairing or checking up,” Jon started again, pulling her to him, invading her space, claiming all her land, “they need to be tested before they’re sent back. I test as much as I can every time I come home.” 

She sharply looked back at him, shaking her head, “Oh, Hells no, Commander.” There was absolutely no way she would go on a _broken_ military aircraft with a fighter pilot that was compared to nothing less than a cowboy from the Seventh Hells. 

“You said you always wanted to fly,” he said, laughing, his hand absentmindedly drawing soothing circles up and down her back, clouding her mind with memories of his hands elsewhere; fingerprints forever carved in the softness of her skin, knuckles grazing the side of her breast, long fingers deep inside her cunt.

“I said I wished I had a dragon, _Udrāzmio,_ ” she exclaimed with a derisive laugh, not missing that smile again in his face, the childish one. Turns out, the equivalent of a chocolate cake or a mountain of gifts on Christmas for a fighter pilot was a hangar full of defective airplanes. “That’s _widely_ different!” she insisted. She had told him she wished she had a dragon to fly like in the legends. She said it while she was naked under him swapping stories and dreams with him, moments intimate enough for her to cherish, not too much for him to _know_ her too deeply. 

She had been a fool thinking any moment with him wouldn’t weave into something more on its own, taking life, making music between every one of the heartbeats raging against her ribcage. 

“Flying is flying.”

“Not in a broken helicopter!” 

“Come on Miss Snow, where is your sense of adventure,” he crooned at her, playing all his cards well, playing with that stupid attractive northern burr of his voice, that _Miss Snow_ that sent shivers down her spine and needs dampening her panties. He wasn’t playing fair. 

“On the ground,” she said, closing her eyes, trying to regain her composure, finding it difficult with his hands slowly unbuttoning her coat to dance around her collar bone, “and not on board of a defective aircraft, Jon.” 

She said his name, trying to do something to him with it, trying to wake something carnal in him, to convince him, to use it as a weapon the exact same way he was using _Miss Snow_ against her. 

“It’s fixed,” he said, pulling her to a cabinet full of flying gear, not nearly protesting enough when he attached a black vest on top of her coat. 

“If I die in a crash, Jon Snow, I will haunt you for the rest of your life,” she huffed toward him, unable to keep the heat in her words, too preoccupied by the heat caused by the hot coals of need erupting in her lower abdomen watching him put on what could only be described as combat gear. 

_Holy fuck he was hot._

“Don’t be absurd, Love,” he said, bringing her to him by the safety vest, planting a searing kiss on her lips, sucking her top lip in his mouth, “if you die in a crash, I will most likely die too.” 

“I hate you,” she whimpered hovering against his lips, asking for more, not meaning any of these words. 

“You really don’t,” he said knowingly. 

“That’s just because that outfit does something to me, _Udrāzmio_ ,” she conceded with a saucy smile, her fingers gripping his flight gear. 

__

They end up in a small black helicopter he called Little Bird, flying smoothly into the night sky like they were invisible, like they were part of it. He reluctantly admitted the smaller helicopter wasn’t his favourite, but it seemed more appropriate for what he had in mind than the supersonic F-35 jet he preferred. 

He was absolutely right … but a small part of her wished she could see him in all the gear necessary to fly a fighting jet actually capable of breaking the speed of sound. 

She gripped the handle over the door when they took off and she could hear his amused laugh in the headpiece he gave her, the sound perfectly smooth even with the small static she could hear in the background. 

She didn’t truly understand what they were doing until she could see the golden lights breaking the horizon over the treetops, creating perfect lines of gold, orange, light blue, dark blue and black. She gasped, quickly looking at him before looking back at the sunrise, getting on the edge of her seat, closer to the windshield. 

“Is this your version of driving off into the sunset,” she asked, looking at him knowingly, something almost tugging at her heartstring, telling her she was letting him do the grand gestures, sweeping her off her feet, making her want _this_ more than anything, making her enjoy every moment in the shape of him. 

“It’s _flying_ off into the _sunrise_ Daenerys,” he corrected her cockily, like it was so much better than the other option. 

It was. _The smooth motherfucker._

He flew them toward the sunrise and she couldn’t look away from the colours peeking out of the trees, slowly conquering the night, splashing everything with light, averting her eyes only when she couldn’t help looking at him. He looked skilled, confident, relaxed, like there was not one part of him feeling out of place while flying. At this exact moment, she just knew, she just understood with something heavy pressing down her chest just exactly what kept him in the Night’s Watch for so long. 

He obviously loved flying. 

There was something so alluring about him in that moment, relaxed, manoeuvring the stick, muscles playing in his forearm and neck. She squirmed back into her seat, closing her legs tighter together. 

“If I try to have my way with you right now, what are the chances of us crashing?” She asked, licking her lips with a flick of her tongue when he turned toward her, pushing her hand up his tight, her knuckles grazing his crotch. 

“Pretty fucking high, Love,” he grunted with a pained laugh, stopping the ascension of her hand, pushing it down toward his knee, lacing his free hand with hers, keeping it firmly in place. 

“Bummer.” 

He flew them down in a gorge, so low, her heart jumped in her throat, bracing herself for a crash that never came, laughing, delight bubbling out of her chest. He was manoeuvring the curves of the gorge, moving the chopper elegantly between the walls of rock and ice, pumping adrenaline in her veins, bringing them to a waterfall, the blades of the Little Bird slicing through the water, making her laugh. 

He did it again just to hear her laugh some more, to see her hand try to find purchase on the door while her other hand squeezed his with more force when he dipped over the waterfall at an impossible angle. 

_Cowboys-fighter-fucking-pilot-from-the-seventh-hells._

This was perfect. 

She wished they could stay there for a thousand years. Whatever the number of minutes that represent. 

___

There was a black hole in her brain between the moment Jon landed the chopper near the hangar and the moment she took his face in her hands, pulling him toward her to crash her lips forcefully against him, her tongue automatically searching for his, her fingernails deeply embedded in his skin. She drank his surprised breath with a shaky inhale of her own, moaning around his name on the tip of her tongue, now buried in the deep of his mouth. 

She pulled him to her before the blades could stop turning above their head, like having his lips on hers was an emergency, like stroking his tongue with her own was a life or death dilemma. 

And it was. 

“Jon,” she whined like a goddamn baby, no caring about how the simple way she said his name was begging in itself, not caring about anything other than getting what she needed from him. 

She needed absolutely _everything._

The whine transformed back into a moan when his rough hand circled her throat, his thumb and forefinger pushing at her jaw to change the angle, to make her gasp for air in his mouth, searching for every part of him she could taste. He twisted her braid tightly around his other hand, pulling her face to him, bringing her on top of him, her thighs on either side of him in the cramped seat. 

She cursed again —in Valyrian or in the common tongue she couldn’t tell—her shaky breath catching in the black curls falling in his face, catching in her throat with the sting in her scalp from her braid around his hand, with the soothing of his thumb circling the nape of her neck. She gave as much as she received, her finger closing in his hair, her tongue cursing around his own, her gasp challenging his moan, her hips meeting him in a slow dance that she wasn’t sure who was leading. 

“So, you liked it?” He asked cheekily. 

His sassiness was short-lived with her mouth suddenly latching at his neck, pulling harder at his hair to bring his head back, to give her access to more, to dip her tongue in his jugular notch before dragging it up, trails of her saliva left behind, hot breath catching it on fire. His Adam’s Apple bobbed up and down under her tongue, chasing her across his throat. 

“Oh … you should feel just how much I liked it, _Udrāzmio,_ ” she whispered hovering over his mouth with a small wicked smile and a slow and calculated move of her hips, making her moan his name in his mouth, driving the pitch lever against her ass, “I’m _drenched_.”

“Fuck, Love,” he lamented, bringing her down on his crotch harder, his fingers on her waist, trying to dig their way under the multiple layers of her outfit, to dig their way under her skin. 

He pushed open her vest and her coat, getting it stuck between her ass and the driving stick pushing into her flesh, no longer between his fingers and her curves, no longer an obstacle to his hand mapping every road that could lead to her breast, dipping under her shirt, ripping the fabric with not an ounce of regret on his face. 

“ _Qogralbar, qogralbar, qogralbar,_ ” she loudly cursed when she felt his mouth close around her nipple over the cup of her bra, his grey eyes never leaving her gaze, watching every move of her face, every sound leaving her mouth in a small cloud of condensing breath. She could feel the wetness and the warmth of his mouth through the thin layer of lace, the sharpness of his teeth across the fabric, dragging and scratching like a curse, making her squirm against him. One of her hands was still lost in his hair, trapping him against her chest, the other one flat on the cold glass roof of the helicopter.

He left her right breast to repeat the same on the other; the sudden cold air hitting the barely covering lace was almost as heart stopping as his hot mouth, like a contrast she never knew she needed, leaving her breathless. 

One of his hands was under her shirt, flat on her back, like it was covering all the space, the expanse of silky skin he was rediscovering like it was the first time. She breathed his name again, rolling her hips against him, earning a trust that brought her dangerously close to cracking her head open on the roof. He was bringing her against him, melting her body on his, dragging her nipple out of her bra and into his mouth, making her moan a broken sound that sounded like a prayer ending with his name. 

Her own hands were trying to explore his body, unbuttoning, unzipping, opening everything she could find, searching for skin, looking for more of him, for the heat of the promise he was professing against her breast. She was _finally_ reaching his pants when his blunt fingernails raked on her back, stopping her with the hiss of her name on her breast, with his hot cloud climbing between his mouth and her damp skin. 

“Fuck, Dany, I—I,” he started, looking up at her, dragging his nose on the erected nipple he just freed from his mouth, making her close her eyes slowly, “—I don’t have a condom.” 

He was chasing after his breath, creating more clouds between them, blurring her vision of him, her nipple grazing his face with every deep breath she was taking, with every buzzing sound she was chasing out of her mind, making sure she understood him. 

“What?” she asked, breathless. 

It has been _weeks_ … surely he was kidding.

“Don’t make me say it again,” he pleaded, grunting, pushing his forehead against her, rolling it on her chest, breathing her in, her hips still searching for the friction of his entrapped cock against her, pushing on her clit, making her whimper. 

“You flew me to see the sunrise,” she started, bringing his face out of her breast, her nails deep on the side of his jaw. “And a waterfall … and you _didn’t bring a condom for that?_ ” she asked, disbelief dripping for her voice. 

It took everything in her not to whimper in pain when he slowly shook his head, his face trapped between her hands, between her nails, her face on top of his head, her legs trembling around him. “It sounded presumptuous to bring them,” he admitted. 

“Like I didn’t let you fuck me silly after only a bad flirt in a bar,” she mumbled under her breath, trying to find her air. 

“It was a good flirt.” 

“I want to just ... don’t care about it,” she said with a short breath on his hair. She wanted to not care about the condom and care about nothing else than the moment. He jerked up into her with a whimper at her words, giving her that sinful friction that could never be enough, that could never be like the feeling of him stretching her out, but was enough to make her breathe his name in a long whine, breaking at the end of it, enough to make him curse in response. 

“Fuck, Dany don’t say that,” he said with the shattered voice of someone that knew it was _almost_ what he wished for her to say. She could see his resolve wavering in his eyes, hear it die in the thick desire in his voice a little more with every roll of her hips. She could feel the tension building in his shoulder, the way he was only a couple strokes away from snapping and just … don’t care either. 

She stilled her movements with every last bit of self-restraint she possessed, breathing deeply, shaking the scent of them stuck in her nose. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear herself sob in unresolved sexual tension. 

“You don’t say _that_ ,” she answered in reference to that name coming out of his mouth. She doesn’t think she could survive imagining him moaning it against her skin, his cock deep inside her. “Not if you want me to be a good girl about it and have a semblance of control,” she added, breathless. 

He pushed his face between the tatters of her shirt, between the soft skin of her breast, breathing deeply, sending shattered puffs of air against her skin, breaking like waves on a shore, like a storm on a cliff. 

“That sucks,” she finally said in a small voice full of complaints and sorrow. She couldn’t think of anything worse than this and he had the _nerves_ of letting out a laugh on her chest when she whined about it, bringing her closer to him, his nose running up the valley between her breast, his breath hitching at the friction of her jeans against his hard cock again.

“Turn around,” he whispered, scratching his way up her collarbone and her neck with his beard, dragging his teeth on the fragile skin, closing his mouth on the pulsing point. He could probably feel the erratic beats of her heart still jumping in and out of her body with every move of him, with every rocking of her hips. 

She turned her head to catch his mouth, to lick his lips and find his eyes, to question him with her gaze. He just nipped at her lips once more, losing his grip on her to help her turn around on top of him, cursing in her hair when her ass robbed on his cock, closing his teeth on her shoulder. 

He fastly undid the buttons of her jeans, pushing his fingers in her underwear, meeting the slickness of her needs for him, all her desire converging between her legs. They moan at the same time, him with his mouth still closed on her shoulder, her toward the sky, her head rolling back against him.

His fingers dragged her wetness toward her clit, moving up and down her slit, circling the bundle of nerve, grazing it with his fingernail, applying pressure, leaving it to go down her slit again. He pushed a finger inside her cunt, bending it, thrusting it torturously slowly inside her. 

“Jon,” she whimpered, moving her hips toward him, feeling him under her ass, sliding down against him, trying to grip the back of his neck harder, her finger closing around his hair. 

“Prop your foot there,” he said with the roughness of his northern accent rolling around every word, his lips running up the column of her neck to her ears. He hooked his foot under her ankle to bring it to a screen before them, to some sort of control panel. 

She pushed against the screen, pushing herself more snuggly against his back, preventing her from sliding down, permitting her to rub on him, to try and control his finger in her cunt, searching for her name tumbling out of his mouth in her ear. 

He put another finger in her for a second, sliding it out again and out of her pants, making her whimper and mourned the touch before he traced the contour of her lips with his wet fingers, with his fingers full of her. She opened her mouth, sucking them in as he pushed inside, her tongue rolling around his fingers, pushing them to the roof of her mouth to suck her tangy taste off them, releasing them with a wet pop quieter than the grunt escaping him.

He used his wet fingers on her jaw to turn her face toward him, to bring her lips to his and lick the remaining of her juice off her lips. The sound coming out of his mouth was wicked and sinful, making her want something they can’t have right now. 

With his tongue still devouring every nook of her mouth, he pushed his fingers in her cunt again. Bending. Pumping. Trusting. His thumb circled her clit lazily at first, adding more pressure with every pump of his fingers, with every circle around her clit and every graze over it. 

“Jon,” she whimpered over his mouth when she could hear the control panel crack and move under her foot.

“I don’t care,” he breathed, his fingers going faster, his free hand bringing her ass firmly on his crotch, “just come for me, Love.”

Her breath caught on her throat, her foot pushing on the screen, her hips chasing his finger and the delicious rub of her ass against his cock. She opened her mouth in a silent cry, in a wordless warning that she was coming and he whispered sweet nothing against her lips of how beautiful she was, of how sweet she smelled and how mouthwatering she tasted … of how he got her. 

He crashed his lips against her, drinking every sound of her orgasm right out of her mouth, calming every tremble of her body and catching her when the control panel gave out under her foot. 

His muscles tensed up, his own breath as short as hers in her mouth, his fingers closing tighter on her waist. 

“Well,” he said in a breath, sliding his fingers out of her and bringing her mess to his mouth, “I don’t think I came in my pants since I was fourteen.”

She looked at him in the corner of her eyes, at the redness colouring the top of his cheek and the tip of his nose and she laughed. It was a small broken laugh at first, full of short breath and catching air behind the back of her hand. It became louder when she saw the cracked control panel hanging between Jon’s feet. 

“We broke you,” she laughed again, his own laugh getting lost in the nest of hair at the back of her head, “and we broke the helicopter.” 

“There is no way around naming that first-born child after Tormund now,” he deadpanned, side-eyeing the control panel, making her laugh even more. 

“Commander?” She asked calming her breath and her laugh, shivering, the cold finally catching up with her. 

“Mmm,” he simply grunt, kissing a trail of sins on the back of her neck. She could feel his teeth coming through, his smile stretching his lips against her skin. She could feel _happiness_ seeping inside her body. 

“Bring me back home now,” she said in a whisper, lacing her words with every sinful intention she had, snuggling against him, still unable to move, “where there’s a bed, or possibly a window of some sort.” She wanted to go back, to unwrap him like a Christmas present, tugging at every button, every zip, every flap until there was just him under her hands. 

___

Jon tried to silence her giggles with his lips, breathing them in, muffling them until the only sound they could make was the sliding of their socked feet on the hardwood floor and the small thud of her back hitting the walls every few steps they managed to make. He shushed her again, pushing her higher on the wall, forcing her to bring herself on the tip of her toe to meet his lips in a soft dance, like they were moving in slow motion, like they were printing themselves on the other ones, like they were slowly digging secrets, finding treasures. 

They were trying to find their way to his room without seeing anyone else, to continue something they started weeks ago in a dive bar in Dragonstone, in the cliffside house that felt like home, something he ignited this morning in a silent ride on a snowy road and on a dreamy flight toward the sunrise. 

He was kissing her with tenderness, with something that felt like silk between her fingers, like it was consuming all the air in her lungs, filling her eyes with unshed tears and her throat with unspoken words. He ran his fingers on every curve of her braid, rolling the end around his index finger, his other hand detailing the contour of her face, memorizing every detail of it with the tip of his fingers. 

She searched for his lips, cushioning herself against him, in the softness she could almost not bear, in the warmth that rendered her breathless, searching for air as much as she was searching for him. 

He detached his mouth from hers to breathe, his exhale invading her nose, burning its way to her lungs, sending shivers down her spine. He rolled his forehead on hers gently, his eyes on hers, making her want to dive in them, to drown herself in the blackness of his pupil. His eyes were telling her things she wasn’t ready to hear, things she wanted to beg him to say, to scream in the deafening silence, kissing them on her lips, carving them on her skin.

He took her hand to move her down the corridor, deeper in the massive house, his forehead never leaving hers, his breath mingling with hers, his lips stretching in a smile that could easily become her favourite. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” she heard behind them, jumping at Sansa’s voice, not looking at her friend, just knowing she had her arm crossed over her chest. 

“Shit,” Jon mumbled, his lips grazing her mouth with the word, stretching in a smile, making her puff a laugh on his face again, “you didn’t see us, Sans.” 

He detached himself from her to negotiate with his sister, bringing their joined hands to his chest, scratching at the scar. She saw him do that the day before, like something was tugging at his chest, like something tried to find their way in or out. 

“Unfortunately, I can see you just fine, Jon!” Sansa told him, one of her eyebrows perfectly arched at him, levelling him with a gaze Dany saw her use multiple times in meetings and conferences, “and we are all waiting for you.” 

“Come on Sans, I’m asking for 30 minutes, tops,” he pleaded again, moving slowly toward the stairs like Sansa couldn’t see him trying to retreat. 

“Thirty minutes—if I heard correctly, that’s not _all_ you need,” she said, levelling Daenerys with her stare, making her stifle a new laugh against Jon’s shoulder. 

“Sansa—” Daenerys started, her fingers still tightly gripped on the collar of his shirt, his coat partly pushed down his shoulder. 

“Do you remember the first time we talked about _Commander Hotstuff_?” Sansa asked her, interrupting her with a glint in her eyes, like a glee mix with something cold and calculating, with something that made her swallow an uncomfortable lump in her throat, anticipation running down her back. 

She nodded. She did remember. 

“All the details and precise information about _everything_ he did to you, making me ask why _I_ didn’t have one of my own?” Sansa continued in a clipped tone laced with disgust, tapping her fingernails on her arms, “This is payback, Dany.” 

“How could I have known it was your brother?” she asked, looking back at Jon, at his face like he was incapable of choosing if he was horrified like a brother should or proud like a cocky bastard. She could see a mix of both taking over his features. 

“It’s burned in my mind now, Dany!” she whispered-screamed at her, making her lips twitch at the corner, trying to hide it behind her fingers, seeing the same amusement at the corner of Jon’s lips, “it’s burned there forever!” 

“Sansa—” Jon tried again, closing his mouth at the finger she pointed at his face, looking way too much like their mother when she was chastising Arya. 

“I’m calling revenge for the gingerbread cookies and the awful details on Commander Hotstuff,” she said with finality, smiling victoriously, preening at the satisfaction of winning against them both. 

Jon pulled Daenerys behind him, going for the stairs, challenging Sansa with a cocky smile, “See you in 30 minutes, Sans—make it 45!”

“Oh, Jon, I never engage in any argument if I’m not ready to play dirty to win. You should know that by now,” she said knowingly, stopping Jon on his track, making Dany bump against his back before he turned back toward his sister, cocking an eyebrow at her, waiting for her to play her last card. Daenerys knew they should be scared.

“Rickon!” she sing-songed loud enough for her voice to carry deeper in the house toward the living room or the kitchen, “Jon is here!!” 

“That’s low Sans!” Jon grunted, looking at the ceiling. They could hear the small feet of the boy tapping the floor in the fastest run his legs could take. 

“It’s Christmas morning,” Sansa reminded them. 

“I don’t bloody care about Christmas,” Jon said, pinching the bridge of his nose, squeezing Daenerys hand.

“You don’t _bloody_ care about Christmas?” asked a small wavering voice attached to the small feet halting right in front of Jon, his lips already quivering like Jon just told him Santa Claus didn’t exist. 

“I didn’t mean it that way buddy,” Jon said softly, getting down on eye level with him, stopping the small quiver of his lips with his thumb. 

“In what other way could you mean it?” the boy asked, incredulous. 

“I just wanted Sansa to let me have more time alone with Dany before the gifts,” Jon answered honestly, looking back at her, undressing her, making her feel like he could see under her bones with that look. Something told her that every fibre of him was honest, dipped in honour and truthfulness. 

“You want to smell her hair, don’t you? and ask her to give her desert to you?” Rickon asked knowingly, making her laugh softly at him, at the memory of the boy sitting on Jon’s lap the day before, at the memory of him with a long strand of her hair in his hand, bringing it to his nose. 

“Aye. Something like that,” Jon admitted, red colouring the top of his cheeks. 

“But I waited for you for hours and hours now!” Rickon exclaimed, circling his hand around Jon’s neck, “Do Dany later!” 

“Okay,” Jon scoffed, conceding, his face redder, making her laugh again. She couldn’t remember the last time she laughed that much, the last time her cheeks hurt because of her smiles, the last time she was searching for someone’s eyes to share a smile like she was doing now. “We just need to change first,” Jon said toward Sansa.

“Why?” 

“Details, precise information—” Daenerys warned her, pinching her lips together at the horror in Sansa’s face, mimicking almost perfectly the horror in her face when she realized exactly who Commander Hotstuff was. 

“Oh my Gods, you are disgusting,” she said, a hand on her chest, pointing at the stairs, “Rickon is going with you!”

___

“This is ridiculous,” Jon mumbled grumpily, his face against the side of hers, looking at Robb’s gift, his fingers absentmindedly playing with the end of her hair, pulling on the bouncy curl at the end of her braid. 

“This is awesome!” Rickon argued, his hand lost inside it with hers, playing with her fingers with gleeful energy. 

She looked back at Robb on the other side of the Christmas tree to try and avoid Catelyn Stark’s gaze with the best of her abilities. It was a mother’s look, like she knew exactly what was going on, like she couldn’t keep her smile at bay every time she saw Daenerys reach for her son, every time he looked down at her with that tenderness that made it impossible to breathe. It was a mother’s look she had never been on the receiving end of. She didn’t know what to make of it; how do you take the warmth of this smile, knowing the coldness of her disappointment will soon follow? 

She didn’t know how. She never had to know anything about mothers. 

Robb raised his coffee mug at her, a cocky grin in place, something that felt like a part of him, like something he did knowing he was always like that, convincing himself he didn’t lose it in his divorce, in the divorce Sansa claimed shattered him beyond repair. Half of the time, this grin felt plastered on his face for the sake of others, but not now. Now it was a proud grin for the win of the day. He managed to give the worst and most tacky gift to Jon, laughing at the unsure look on Jon’s face when he opened the box. 

She smiled back at him, raising her mug to him, hiding the remnant of her smile behind the rim, lifting her other hands to him, trapped in the ‘mitten-for-two’ he gave Jon, holding hands with a giggling Rickon. Robb argued it was the least he could do, now that he knew Jon was a ‘soft motherfucker.’

Robb laughed harder when Jon flipped him the middle finger, Rickon gasping on top of him. “Hey grumpy pants,” Daenerys said, turning toward him, her nose bumping on his, “stop sulking, it was a funny gift.” 

“I know,” he said, hiding a smile against her jaw, his finger tapping the top of her and Rickon’s hand in the mitten, “he wouldn’t have won if I didn’t complain, Love. That’s the game.” 

She moved back a bit to smile at him. She felt like she was smiling at him with all her face, with her whole heart, body and soul, like every small and shattered piece of her was moving to lock itself in her smile, to take their place there. “So you’re brooding because you’re a good team player?” she asked, amused, moving a strand of hair back from his face, entranced by the curls falling artfully all over the place, giving him an untamed look, something fierce and unmanageable that make her heart beats faster, that make it drop in her stomach like she was free-falling. 

“Exactly,” he said.

She shook her head at him, moving her attention back to Rickon, to the hidden war of thumbs taking place in the mitten, the extra challenge making the boy laugh harder, squirming on Jon’s laps, sliding down of them in an attempt to push his whole body in the battle, a hand always on Jon’s knee, like it was impossible for him to let him go, not to touch a part of Jon at every minute, not to soak him in at every moment. 

_She found herself understanding the emotional needs of a five-year-old._

He screamed in victory, holding her thumb down with his, “Can we go play ‘The Long Night’ now?” he asked her, turning pleading eyes toward Jon. Daenerys was absolutely certain the boy knew Jon would be unable to resist this version of the puppy eyes. 

Daenerys had a talent at reading people, at observing a room and picking up small things, small gestures and unspoken words. In one day, she saw what seemed like thousands of facets of Jon Snow, _Udrāzmio,_ Commander Hotstuff, so many of them she couldn’t find the best way to catalogue them all, to remember every single one of them, adding up to the man she already had a hard time to leave behind, to forget and push out of her mind. 

Jon was a family man, craving every moment he could get, filling himself with every bit of it; he had an evident soft spot for Rickon, Arya and their mother. Rickon was gluing himself to Jon at every opportunity and Jon was giving them to him, the boy being so much like Jon, Catelyn believed he would make her die from worries before her time. 

That was another thing, he was reckless, looking danger in the eye, dancing with it without fear of it burning him. _She_ had nothing dangerous to offer, nothing to quench his thirst for it, for adrenaline, for something more… _She was never the more, always the less._

_She was always holding back._

“Yes, let’s go,” Jon said, tapping on Rickon’s nose, making her smile; she knew he would be absolutely unable to say no to those eyes and by the look of it, Rickon knew it just as much.

“How do we play ‘The Long Night’?” she asked, knowing the historical battle that took place the night after Christmas a long time ago, the defeat of the Night King and the victory of The Dragon Queen and her King in the North. The death of too many people. 

Jon was about to answer her, when Rickon pushed both of his hands on his mouth, shushing him, making them laugh. 

“It’s a snowball fight,” Arya said. 

“Arya! I wanted to tell,” Rickon exclaimed, annoyed at her for stealing his thunder and explaining the game to her. 

“I know,” she answered with a smirk, throwing a ball of wrapping paper in his face, “you need to be faster Ricky.” 

“You’re not on my team anymore, Arya!” the boy said, kicking the paper on the ground, frowning at her, “you’ll be with The Dead.” 

“I don’t mind,” she said, an amused look on her face, leaning toward Rickon, her arms on her legs, “Jon is always the Night King.” It was the deathly blow, the reason why Rickon took a sharp breath and moved back on the couch, making everyone laugh except him. 

“But I want to be with Jon,” he whined. 

Everyone knew that. 

“Too bad,” Arya laughed, getting up, messing Rickon hair, making him shriek at her and trying to climb on top of Jon. 

“Arya, for the love of Gods,” their mother started with a sigh, “stop antagonizing your brother, he’s five.” 

Arya found Daenerys eyes and rolled her own, mumbling something about them not needing another mama’s boy, because the first one was already impossible to mess with. Daenerys laughed at that, distractedly running her fingers along Jon’s arm, finding comfort in the taut skin under her fingernails, in the twitch of his arm, sliding up to close his fingers around hers, entwining them together. 

She jumped when Arya screamed a laugh of delight and mischief, holding a phone in her hand. By the whispered pleading coming from Gendry, it was probably his. 

“You guys broke a freaking helicopter?” she asked, jumping toward them, showing them a picture of the control panel she destroyed in the midst of her orgasm. Daenerys froze, her hand clamping down on Jon’s, her heart beating faster in her chest, going out of her throat, buzzing in her ears. 

_Fucking Hells._

“Oh, baby, you flew in those dreadful broken aircraft again?” Catelyn lamented, her hand twisting the necklace Jon gave her, refusing to give his mother an ugly gift, maintaining his favourite spot, “Are you hurt?” 

She sounded worried, the hand not playing with her necklace was closing over Ned’s forearm, like she could learn any moment that Jon and Daenerys crashed and died, even though they were in front of her, mortified by what’s going to follow. 

“Believe me, they’re not hurt, mama,” Arya said, still laughing. 

Daenerys closed her eyes, taking a deep breath before opening them again, plunging them in Arya’s amused eyes, taking the phone in her hands, “It appears we did break it, _Udrāzmio.”_ She said it in the coolest tone she could manage, ignoring the blush she could feel creeping down her face and neck and the rapid beats of her heart. 

Jon followed her lead, looking at the picture, frowning, “How on earth?” He joked. She couldn’t stop herself from looking at him, from seeing the sheepish smile creeping on his lips. She hit him lightly with her elbow, making him lose a restrained laugh on the top of her hair. 

“That’s exactly my question: how on earth?” Arya asked, taking the phone back, examining the picture, reading Tormund’s messages again, sharing the phone with Sansa and Robb hovering over her shoulder. 

“What do you mean how? It’s sex,” Robb said with no doubt in his voice. 

“I know that!” Arya answered with annoyance, hitting Robb in the face with the phone in her hand, “I want to know _how.”_

“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Sansa said before looking back at them, levelling her with her icy blue stare, incapable of hiding the glint of amusement and the deep affection, making Dany rested against Jon a bit more. 

She was grateful for the hand slowly drawing arabesque on the nape of her neck, climbing up her hair, sinking down her back. Sansa was searching for her words carefully and Dany knew there was no way around it, pushing her back against Jon’s hand, reminding herself of the bar in Dragonstone, of the time she finally felt his fingertips on her skin. 

“Did you break a helicopter during intercourse?” Sansa asked, her eyes unwavering. 

Daenerys smiled at her choice of words and nodded. They had a rule: never to lie to each other if they ask a direct question. Sometimes, Sansa preferred not knowing everything, she preferred the grey of the unknown, the possibility to not be liable or held accountable for things she knew. But other times she was asking for the truth … like now. 

“You did? First you ripped curtains and smashed a vintage desk, then you broke a bloody helicopter?” she asked, incredulous, pushing her arms to the sky, “Where do you think you are Dany? In a Twilight remake?”

Behind her, Arya and Robb guffawed, holding each other up. Dany could hear Jon laughing behind her ear, making it impossible for herself to stay serious, to keep the smile at bay and the laugh down in her chest. 

In the midst of her laugh, Dany caught Sansa’s hand in hers, tugging her friend to her. Sansa protested half-heartedly, letting Dany pull her in even if she was so much smaller than her. She fell on the other side of her, her head falling to Daenerys shoulder. She fell into that habit of seeking her comfort from her in any situation like she did in university; like when Theon broke her heart over text, like every time Jamie Lannister made her heart speed up with his smile. 

“I’m sorry, Sans,” Dany whispered to her, running her finger in the long red hair tumbling on her back and over her shoulder in a straight curtain of silk. She played with her hair, still feeling Jon cheek propped on the other side of her head, breathing strands of her hair away. 

“This is the most traumatic Christmas ever,” Sansa complained, shuddering, “I’ll always have nightmares about it.” 

“This is actually my best Christmas,” Dany told her in a small voice. It was the first Christmas that ever felt real to her, that ever felt like it was supposed to be: a comforting chaos. 

Sansa sharply looked at her, searching for her answer in silence. Dany let her look, let her search, knowing her like the back of her hand, knowing how the girl liked to search for an answer before asking the question, “Really?”

“ _Kessa,”_ Dany simply said, nodding at her friend without hesitation. It _was_ her best Christmas. 

Sansa looked at her more, gently tracing a symbol on the back of her hand, using a code they hadn’t used in months. 

_Are you okay?,_ she asked with the symbol, making Dany laugh.

_Blink once if you’re not, blink twice if you are, blink thrice if you’re more than okay._

Daenerys looked back at her friend, watching her face morphed slowly at her blinks, watching a smile at the corner of her lips before putting her head back on her shoulder with a sigh. 

“Okay then,” Sansa simply said.

_Daenerys had blinked thrice._

___

The day had been perfect, the snow fight had been an experience, the family dinner and the banter had been everything she never had, everything she never experienced before. The stark were a family, a cacophonic bunch of idiots that snap at each other, grunt, blame, insult, but most of all, they were a cacophonic bunch of idiots that love each other so deeply she didn’t know how they could handle that many people living them that much. 

Dany had never felt that in her life. 

Missy, Grey and Sansa had always been the closest thing she experienced to a family. They were the family she chose, the important birthdays, the calls in the middle of the night, the holidays and the overflow of affection. 

_They_ were her family, not Viserys, not Rhaegar, not Aerys. 

_Missy, Grey and Sansa._

Dany gently knocked on the heavy wooden door in front of her, taking a step back, playing with the end of her hair, the soft waves now cascading on her back. She waited, straining her ears to listen to the dull sound of footstep coming to the door, to the sound of him shifting, of him living. 

He opened the door in a movement strong enough to make her hair move, to make her breath catch in her throat at the vision of him, like she hadn’t seen him just minutes ago, like she couldn’t control the sharp inhale of air she took in shock every time she found him there. 

He breathed a laugh in her direction, a cloud of mint and whisky, “We knock now?” 

She smiled at him and nodded, with her chest still up in her throat, not telling him that knocking at his door meant he would have to invite her in, to open his door and make a space for her in his life. He will have to make _her_ a conscious choice. 

She had always been the one to make the choice, to invite him in, to bring him home, to ask him to stay longer. She had been the one to make all the bad choices that followed; watching him leave—knowing she could probably have asked more of him—, wanting to ask more, never calling him, trying to forget. 

Without another word he opened the door more, leaving the doorway empty between them, as if he were asking her to choose him in return, to make that decision with him, as if she could make any other than this one at this point. 

She closed the door gently behind her, her eyes never leaving his, hooked on his eyes, _surviving_ on them somehow. “You were gone forever,” he said pulling her to him with a strong hand closed on the nape of her neck, weaving his fingers with her hair, bringing her to him with gentleness, with the same slowness he used when they arrived in the morning, with the same promises she would beg him to keep. 

He kissed her with reverence, slowly opening her lips with his, hitching her breath in her throat until the only thing she could breathe was him with his mint and his whisky, with his soft lips dancing with hers, with his tongue licking its way to her mouth. 

She invited him in, her hand travelling up his chest to his neck to finally land on his hair, on the edge of the face she wanted to know by heart, like she was the one mapping it, discoreving every detail, every one of his islands. She wanted to discover a new corner of him and name it after herself. 

“I was gone five minutes,” she protested in a ragged breath. She went to her _new room_ for the shortest amount of time she could. 

“Didn’t miss me at all?” He asked, dragging her closer to him, “I’m hurt.” He stepped back, keeping her against him with a constant dancing hand on her back, reaching for the flames on her skin under her sweater. He kept her lips trapped with his, drinking her up until he hit the mattress with the back of his legs. He moved back to breathe, pinning her eyes with his stare behind heavy lids and black fluttering eyelashes, his grey eyes glazing over like a stormy night sky. 

“I did, _Udrāzmio_.”

He moved his hands from her back, moving them along the bottom of her sweater with a torturous pace, hooking his fingers under the hem, grazing his knuckles on the skin of her side and moving them up her body slow enough to leave a trail of goosebump behind. He was asking her everything that needed to be asked with his eyes and the small tilted of his head. 

She lifted her arms and he pulled off her sweater over her head, still trailing his fingers over her skin, brushing against the side of her breast, making her lose track of time, lose track of the beating of her own heart. 

She pulled on his shirt, getting the tail and the hem out of his pants, bunching the fabric in her hand to let her fingernails lightly scratch the ridges of his abs, drawing a sharp and throaty sound from him. 

She wanted more of this sound, of his saccaded breath around her heavy name.

She took her time with him, keeping the urgency and the frenzy trapped in her ribcage. Unbuttoning every button with the same slowness as him, she trailed behind her open mouth kisses and flick of her tongue. She dragged her lips on his clavicle and dipped her tongue in his jugular notch, eliciting the sounds and grunts she wished to hear. 

She pushed his shirt open, sliding it down his arms, looking up at him and holding his eyes while nipping under his jaw; his beard was already scratching the delicate skin around her mouth. 

The heavy sound of their breaths and moans were the only thing breaking the silence, slicing it open like a hot knife. 

They undressed each other like every move was made underwater, like every move was a soft curve with no sharp lines. Jon sat down on the bed, bringing her flush against him, his fingers playing with the contour of her bra, surfing on the edge of the lace, on the move of her breast at every breath, sliding under the straps to push them down her shoulder. His mouth followed the same path as the strap. His lips kept kissing, his tongue licking, his beard burning. 

“Jon,” she whispered in a hoarse voice, like a question, waiting for him to look back at her, her hands on either side of his face, her thumbs tracing the border of it, “make love to me.” 

It was a demand, a plea she had no right to make. 

She made it anyway. 

He brought her closer to him with a hand at the back of her thigh, moving her on top of him, her legs circling him, capturing him in a bubble that was just for them, imprisoning them in what looked like a lotus made of flesh and heat. 

“Like this?” he asked, dropping her bra on the floor, covering every parcel of skin he could find with his mouth and his hands; kissing, licking, nipping, grazing, caressing. 

_It felt different._

It wasn’t a fire with cracking woods and licking flames. It was embers and hot coals in the pit of her stomach, it was simmers of lava under her skin, dripping on him. 

“Aye,” she said, feeling him smile against the skin of her chest before he looked at her, before she slightly moved her hips, causing a mess on him. She could feel his cock sliding up and down her slit, the head touching her clit with every pass. 

His eyes closed tightly, her name repeating itself out of his mouth, crashing on the lips she pushed on him, like a wave of her and him. 

She heard him open the condom package more than she saw it, her gaze focussed on him, on his face and the black curls sliding in front of his eyes, on the gentle curve of his nose and the fullness of his lips … she was blurring everything else. He pulled her up with firm fingers digging in the flesh of her arse, bringing the head of his cock to the entrance of her cunt. 

She closed her eyes, keeping herself up with her hands on his shoulder, taking every inch of him slowly, stretching around him, adjusting herself with a small whimper ending around a moan. “ _Udrāzmio_ ,” she said throatily, repeating the word, finding purchase on his shoulders, his own hands caressing the tender skin of her thigh, of her arse. She stopped moving when she could feel him completely buried in her, stretching her wall, filling every corner of her. 

“Fuck, Love,” he breathed on her neck, open mouth against her pulse point, sucking, “you feel so good.” He moved out of her neck, running his nose to her jaw, her lips, and the side of her nose until he could look at her, until he could bind her to him with only his eyes. She swallowed his name down just to hear him say more. “You feel like home,” he said, his eyes on hers, a smile on them, his lips brushing her skin at every curve of the words. 

_She felt like home. He felt a little bit like love to her._

_They felt like happiness._

She whimpered, his name the only word she could use to answer, the only word strong enough to pass the lump on her throat, the lump that almost felt like home, like love, like happiness. She brought him to her, her arms around his neck, her hands close in his hair, her breath mingling with his declaration of home, her eyes on his, her cunt already fluttering around him.

She rocked slowly, not moving up, keeping all of him inside her, needing every ridge of him nestled in her and taking every small part of her he could reach. With his arms banded around her, covering all her back and her forehead against his, trapping them in a curtain of hair, he breathed her name in response to his, to everything she was trying to say with his name. 

Dany dug her heels in the small of his back with every rock, bringing herself to him more, brushing her clit against him every time she moved back, driving herself completely insane. His mouth was everywhere, kissing and licking her skin, travelling between her shoulder and her chest. His hands were circling her waist, slowly moving up, grazing a nipple with a thumb he previously wet with her mess, making her whimper his name again, creating sentences with only this, a breathy litany of his name.

He looked at her between every kiss, every lick, every twist of her hips and every move of his thumb around her clit. He studied the change in her face like he wanted to make sure nothing had changed, like he wanted to make sure that she was still opening her mouth in a silent cry when he touched her clit _just right,_ when she was fluttering around him, when she was about to come. 

“I got you, Love,” he said, crashing his lips against her, absorbing the high moan of her orgasm, swallowing his own name and cushioning every one of her trembles with his body, with his hands all over the place. She saw black. She saw white. She saw a myriad of colours before she could see him again, before she could open her eyes and look at him and his blurry edges. 

_He was everything she wanted to see._

He watched her crash. He watched every second of it. She could feel his eyes on her skin like a caress, repeating how beautiful she looked. 

“Hold on to me, Love,” he whispered on her lips, kissing her, kissing her breath away, “I’m not done with you.” 

She whimpered, trying to hold on to him with her shaky legs and weak arms, trying to hold him back to her and keep him in the simmering lava, in the hot coals. He moved them up the bed, her back against the mattress, arching to keep him there with her trembling legs around him. 

She moaned his name again with a small hish of pain at the discomfort of him surrounded by her sensitive skin, by every nerve she possessed, prickling with electricity. 

Jon stayed as immobile as he could, the only move he made was his cock throbbing in her cunt, his head lolling on her neck, cursing when she contracted her muscles around him. 

“Move, _Udrāzmio_ , please.” 

She wanted the discomfort of fired nerves, the spark of all of it, all of them, coming back to life, pulsing with needs, chasing pleasure. 

He pulled out of her torturously slow, giving her time to adjust, giving her sensitive skin time to spark back, giving her time to grasp the sheet with her fist in a semblance of control, in an attempt not to dig her fingernails on his back. 

“ _Oh Jaes! Kessa_ ,” she said, arching her back to meet him back, to meet him halfway of his trust. She hiked her legs higher on either side of him, seeking him, needing him with every overcharged part of her, “ _Tepagon nyke tolī, kostilus._ ”

“Fuck, Dany,” he cursed with the same deep roar of his northern accent every time she speaks Valyrian to him, every time he couldn’t understand a word, but could guess them. 

He pulled again, searching for her mouth, absorbing her cry of pleasure with his lips. She could hear herself echoed in his chest. This kiss was lazy and sloppy, it was a caress of the lips, a movement so infinitely slow she could feel every soft corner of his lips. It was as lazy as a morning of habit, like the urgency was deep in their soul, like they effectively pretended it wasn’t going to end, like they needed the other more than air. 

It was a lazy movement of the tongue following the rhythm of his cock, exchange of heavy breath, lips linked with strands of saliva. 

There was nothing frantic about any of it, she could still feel the need pulsing from them, the overwhelming desire seeping out of every of their pores, the basic craving for each other. 

“Tolī,” she asked in a breath, pulling him to her with a hand on his ass cheek, with a breathy moan in the deep of his ear. 

He pulled and she pushed, he caressed and she scratched, he kissed and she licked, he grunted and she moaned. They chased each other at every trust. He made her cry his name with his hand pushing down on her lower belly, making her feel like he was everywhere, like he was trailing a trail of pleasure in sin on her cunt, touching a place that made her shake with all her body. She made him moan profanity with her legs hiked higher, pulling him deeper, clamping down every muscle she could control. 

She came with her hands scratching his back and his lips opened above hers. 

He came with his face on her neck and all her body circling him to keep him there, to absorb all of his spasms. 

She felt like home. He felt a little bit like love. 

___

She wasn’t sure how long they stayed there, in each other’s arms, the thin film of sweat dry on their skin, his cock out of her cunt, her hair as messy as possible and all of him still on top of her. Jon’s breath had calm, moving like a soft summer breeze on her neck; she kept her fingers in his hair, her fingernails gently running on his scalp, relieving in the sound he made. 

She kept her legs around him, keeping him against her, afraid he might leave, too scared to ask him to stay … She was always too scared. 

“Who’s thinking too loud now?” he asked, puffing air on her neck before kissing it lazily, running his nose against her skin, “What’s on your mind, Miss Snow?” 

_Him. All of him._

“I’m thinking that I want you to stay,” she admitted in a whisper barely above his breathing, barely above the sound of her beating heart pulsing in her ears. 

She was thinking of a windy November morning with rain slapping on her door and the side of their faces, slapping reality at her feet. She was thinking of her fingers tugging his hair tie off his curls that morning, keeping it in her pocket. She was thinking of her voice incapable of saying the words, of her heart beating in her chest, fighting to get out, not knowing yet how much she would miss the one night stand she kept extending to grasp for more.

She was thinking of her not asking him to stay, of him almost begging her to do it. 

He turned his head to look at her, “You’re in my bed, Dany,” he said, waiting for her to look at him, keeping everything else unsaid. She was in his bed, she’ll be the one leaving. She turned her head and looked at him, her nose brushing on his, her eyes on his, pleading for him to understand what she meant, to understand what she was incapable of asking yet again. 

_She wanted him to stay on a windy, rainy day in a cliffside house._

_She wanted him to stay in his own bed on Christmas Night._

He ran his thumb on the side of her face, “Okay,” he said in a whisper, as if he understood. 

They keep their silence, looking at each other, seeking comfort in each other’s eyes, in his hand on her face, in her hand on his hair. 

“I _almost_ called you,” she whispered, breaking the silence, her voice breaking around the ‘almost’ like it was a heartbreaking word. It was always her problem. She had _almost_ asked him to stay, she had _almost_ called him. 

Almost. 

The creases around his eyes deepened at her words, at the way his lips curved over his teeth in yet another breathtaking smile, in yet another proof he had wanted to stay, wanted for her to find him and called. She had been the one with all the cards all along. 

“What?” he asked, her chin pinched in his finger, bringing her to him, to kiss her in a smile with more teeth than lips, “How? When?”

“I abused all my privileges, and had my security team find everything there is to know about you,” she admitted in all seriousness, surprised by the laugh escaping him, chasing her hair around her face, “phone number included.”

She couldn’t resist smiling back at him, content with the sound of his laugh enveloping her, with the warmth of his smile melting away her almost in a puddle of probably. 

“That’s quite the abuse of privileges,” he said, a big smile still on his face, all his weight on her, his hand pushing her hair back, “why didn’t you?” 

He asked with softness, with curiosity, exploring her eyes with his, like he was trying to read her, to read the reason before she told him. He probably could figure it out if she gives him just enough time, if he didn’t seem so eager for her to tell him. 

“I felt that if I did… I would give you permission to break my heart, give myself the opportunity of disappointing you,” she answered honestly, her foot running lazily along the side of his calf and thigh, his eyes pinning her in place, more than all his weight could ever do, “It was a tragic love story remember?” 

“But it’s not.” 

“No, I guess it’s not,” she whispered. It wasn’t inherently tragic. There was a beauty in it, a light in the dark that couldn’t be tragic. 

They weren’t tragic. Maybe she was the only one that was. 

“How do you feel now?” he asked softly, kissing every part of her face his lips could find, brushing them along every curvature, every bone, every soft piece of her. 

_She felt like home. He felt a little bit like love._

She opened her mouth to answer when there was a knock on the door, when there was Sansa voice behind it, telling her Missy was trying to call, telling her it has something to do with Drogo, when there was a bang in her mind, muting the rest of her words in a buzzing sound. 

The bubble bursts, sending shards of glass down on her, slicing her in a deafening thunder of disappointment. She braced herself on Jon’s shoulder, watching him look at the faint mark on her neck, buried under love bites and beard burns, as if he knew what Sansa meant, as if the mention of a name he didn’t know could only be associated with the angry fingers printed on her neck. 

He wasn’t wrong. 

He kissed her tenderly, tracing her face with his hands, pushing the shards of glass away, creating something new in the debris of their burst bubble, before rolling off her, letting her go. 

He got himself situated on the bed, his back against the headboard. She could feel his eyes tracking every of her movement; getting up, bending over to pick up his black dress shirt, buttoning it. 

“Dany?” he called. She looked at him over her shoulder and smiled when he started moving his forefinger around, asking her to turn around on herself, the heat in his eyes more than enough to show her he appreciated the vision of her in nothing other than his shirt. She turned, laughing softly, grateful for the distraction, for the short respite. The shirt slid down her shoulder, her hands hiking it up to her waist, flashing her butt cheeks to him. 

“Satisfied?” she asked cheekily. 

“Not quite.” 

She smiled back at him before opening the door for Sansa, standing on the other side, holding her phone to her with regret paint on her face. For all her protests, she didn’t want to interrupt them, not with something as badly altering as this. Dany took the phone with trembling hands. 

She didn’t want it either. 

“They booked you a flight for tomorrow morning,” Sansa said gently, ripping out a bandaid, serving her the truth like nobody else could.

_Tomorrow Morning._ She was supposed to have more time. 

_She wasn’t ever supposed to have time with him at all_ , a voice reminded her in her mind, a voice suspiciously sounding like Viserys on a bad day. She pinched her lips together, keeping everything from coming out, nodding slightly at Sansa, for too long, like she couldn’t control the movement of her head anymore. 

Drogo had always had a way of tinting her happiness, of choosing the exact right moment to strike and kill the mood, the spark, bringing her to the less he wanted her to be. Whatever he did, it was always the same thing. 

It was always an attempt to make sure her light could never shine brighter than his. 

“I’ll call Missy,” Dany said with a hoarse voice she didn’t even recognize, Sansa kissing her cheek, knowing when there was nothing to add, just everything to leave alone for now. 

As soon as she came back in the room, she strolled to the bed, climbing as fast as she could on the bed, snuggling in Jon’s side with her phone on her ear, searching for the immediate settling of her anxious beating heart against him. She sighted as soon as Jon closed his arm around her, bringing her on his lap, sliding his hand under the hem of his shirt to caress the skin on her hip. 

She felt like Missy took years to answer her phone, like it rang so long she could have missed her flight in the morning. It took her so long that Dany didn’t respond at first when she called her name. 

“Dany?” the distorted voice of Missy called again. Missandei sounded far away, like she was in her car or on speaker phone anywhere else. 

“Tell me what I need to know Missy,” she simply asked, closing her eyes at the movement of Jon’s fingers travelling the column of her neck, down the opening of his shirt to the top of her breast, his fingernails tapping gently against her skin at the same rhythm as her heart. 

It was like he was putting bubble wrap around Missy’s words, softening them in a way they couldn’t really be softened. 

Drogo booked himself an interview with Cersei Lannister. The bitch was trying to dig every gossip possible under the parliament at Aegon’s High Hill due to the fact her own marriage and subsequent divorce was the nastiest gossip to date. She had nothing on her except the emotional female angle, except the angle she shouldn’t use against another woman at all. Drogo was the wild card, the possibility for Cersei to tell their story from his point of view: the frigid, arrogant Dragon Queen, blinded by her ambition, neglecting him, driving him insane and bringing the abuse on herself. He will paint her as cold and hot-tempered at the same time, making it sound like it made sense, and Missy was right; it would be used against her, painting her like an unreliable leader. 

As her communication director, Missy needed her in King’s Landing in the morning to control the narrative. 

As her friend, she apologized a million times for asking for her to come back. 

She understood that. She just wanted a little more. More days. More minutes. More time to convince herself she would be okay to leave after that, she would be okay with the bonus time. Or maybe she just needed a little more time to figure out how to get around that lump in her throat tasting like Jon’s name, keeping her from asking him to stay in any way he was capable of. She would take anything he was able to give if only she could ask for any of it. 

“How do you feel?” he asked again, still taping on her skin on top of her heart, not knowing how she really felt about a man she once loved trying to break her like a twig, about the fact she had to leave in the morning, leaving _him_ behind. 

_She felt broken._

E

arlier, she had felt like home. He had felt a little bit like love. 

“Broken,” she simply said, melting her back on his chest, biting the inside of her cheek at the feeling of his hand brushing away her hair to kiss her temple without a word. There was nothing else to say. 

She wouldn’t cry… She would just hide herself in his chest, breathing him in, breathing the pine trees and the lavender in a ragged breath, sounding broken enough to be a quiet sob. 

None of them would say anything to acknowledge it. 

___

They were silent almost all the way to the airport, her hand on his thigh, her nose lost in the fold of the soft black scarf she stole from him, in his residual scent. The morning came too fast, the reality of her life crashing around her, letting her try to think of a way to possibly fit those broken parts around his edges, to go back to the girl in a bar without a story that got swept out of her feet by a military man with grey eye holding snowflakes, rolled-up sleeves and hands full of promises. 

Catelyn had been lovely that morning, holding her broken frame to her, not caring about anything other than gently petting her hair, thanking her for something she absolutely can’t control, for looking at Jon like she couldn’t see anything other than him. 

She couldn’t. 

She didn’t know what to do with the gentleness of her eyes, with the motherly attention, but she liked it. It was a different feeling. 

“I almost didn’t come back for Christmas,” he said, breaking the silence, bringing her back to the present, to the car leading her away from here … from him. 

“I know,” she said, turning toward him with mischief in her eyes, running her fingers on the inside of his thigh. He lifted a brow at her before shifting his gaze back on the road, his own fingers closed around her wrist, his thumb steadily caressing her pulse point. “Sansa was furious about it, Arya was reciting your name like it was a list of people she wanted to kill,” She explained, his sudden laugh echoing around her, making her own laugh follow, answering his until the last sound, until her breath calmed down and her laugh was replaced by a tender smile, “I’m glad you did.” 

“I’m glad too.” 

She waited for him to look back at her before uttering her next words, she needed to tell them to his face, with his eyes looking down at her the same way he did the day before, with tenderness, like she felt like home. “It was my best Christmas— _you_ were,” she said softly, feeling his thumb putting more pressure on her wrist, making her heart skyrocket. 

It had been the best Christmas … and the worst.

“When do you think we would have seen each other again if I didn’t come back?” he asked, leaving her heart beating even faster in her chest, her fingers digging in his thigh. He said When. Not if. 

_When._

She tried to think about it, to think about another way she could have met him, another time. She found it difficult to imagine; she loved the meeting in the dive bar, the banter, the sparks, the rolled up sleeve and the red lip printed on a shared whisky glass. 

She wouldn’t change it for anything. Not even with the goodbye and the heartache in the rain. “I don’t know,” she finally answered, trying to ignore the fact they were arriving, “Sansa’s wedding maybe?”

“Is there something I should know?” he asked with a seriousness she would have found hilarious in any other circumstances, in front of any other building. 

“No,” she smiled softly, her blood beating up her temple when the car stopped, when the inevitable arrived, “I’m trying but she’s a very difficult woman.” 

He took the keys out of the ignition, finally looking at her, making her start losing ground, losing battles against every part of her protesting, every organ in her trying to shut down, to make her feel the overflow of everything inside her. 

“Is it okay for me to tell you I’ll miss you?” he whispered, playing with her fingers, bringing her hand to his lips, mumbling something she couldn’t understand with the white noise in her ears. 

“I would be crushed if you didn’t,” she answered, waves in her eyes, choking her somehow. She took a sharp and shaky breath when he got out of the car, incapable of keeping her heart out of her throat, her tears in her eyes. He opened her door, bringing her into his arms before she could take a new shaky breath, before she could say his name another time. 

“I’ll miss you Dany,” he murmured lost in her neck, in the loose waves of her hair. 

“Miss Snow,” she corrected, her own fingers flirting with the curls bonded at the back of his head. 

“I’ll miss you, Miss Snow,” he said with a smile, rolling her forehead on hers, breathing cold air around her face. 

“And I’ll miss you too, Commander.”

She untied his hair and took hostage another hair tie at the same time his lips found hers in a fragile embrace, in a graze of plump lips and in a mingle of breath. His tongue traced her mouth, asking entrance, lazily dancing with hers, tracing the roof of her mouth, swallowing every breath she gave him until either of them could breathe anymore.

“Abuse all of those privileges and call me this time?” he asked panting against her lips. 

He begged. 

She took her phone out of her pocket, finding his name in it, bringing it to her ear, smiling at the muffled vibration of his own phone, an unknown number blinking on the screen, his voicemail answering before his thumb could reach the button. 

“Hi,” she said, looking him directly in the eyes, getting lost in the storm, “you can call me back … if you want.” 

He smiled at her, still looking down the screen, his free hand scratching at the top of his biggest scar, “I wonder under what name I would save it.” 

“Personally, I have a preference for Miss Snow,” she said, going back in his arm, in the nook of his neck, running her nose on his skin, searching for his scent until she settled down under his jaw, “It does something to me.” 

She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that, how long his nose stayed in her hair, but knowing they had limited time, knowing it was coming to an end. 

“You feel like home, Dany.”

She looked up at him, giving him a watery smile, holding the dam with all she had, feeling the emotions crushing her inside just to get free, to rage out the pain building in her chest. He had told her that, in the midst of passion. He’s telling her now, with sadness, with more meaning to the words. 

And he felt a little bit like love. 

“This is a bit tragic, isn’t it?” she said, not controlling the break of her voice, the jammed breath at the end of her sentence, watching him shook his head, knowing he was wrong this time. 

She needed to go, to gather all of her pieces, all of her shards of broken glass and leave. 

“Don’t leave before you can’t see me anymore?” she pleaded with him, taking the handle of her bag, her white knuckles trembling around it. “I don’t want to watch you leave again,” she admitted in a voice that finally broke at every word. 

She barely gave him enough time to nod before she kissed him one last time, throwing her pieces at him, hoping he’ll keep some of them with him, whispering his name again before turning around, holding herself together the best she could, her vision already blurring. 

She didn’t slow down before she passed the corner of the building. She was grasping at every strand of them she could touch, tugging on them, watching them unravelled in her grips, die between her fingers like flimsy thread. She wasn’t ready to be the one that got away, to say goodbye with broken pieces of her heart stuck in her throat, convincing herself she couldn’t be heartbroken for a man she didn’t really know. 

But she knew him. 

She knew his different smiles, his voice in the morning and the low moan he did before coming, the texture of his skin and the softness of his curls, the heat of his mouth in contrast to the coldness of his fingers. But more than that, she knew that his heart was beating a little bit faster when she was scratching the nape of his neck, that he didn’t like every aspect of his job, but he came alive in a helicopter, that he would die for his siblings in a heartbeat … and that he wanted to be with her. 

She knew him enough to leave her heart in his hand, bleeding out from a thousand cuts, burning from a forest fire. 

She never knew that happy memories could hurt so bad, could feel like shattered glass in an opened wound, like salty water in her lungs. 

She never knew. 

As soon as she passed the corner of the building, she pushed her back against the wall, tugging on the black scarf she took from him, feeling like she was suffocating, like she was searching for her air, like the air she managed to catch was suspiciously sounding like a ragged sob. 

An uncontrollable sob ripping her throat open in the middle of an airport, the back of her hand pushed hard against her skin, muffling the sound of her heart shattering against her lips, printing her teeth on her skin. She couldn’t keep the sobs from cascading out of her mouth and crashing around her like those butterflies she tried to suffocate inside her stomach every time she was with Jon, like those bubbles she snapped out of thin air every time she could see the snowflakes print in his grey eyes look deep enough into her to know every corner of her soul, like all those moments she convinced herself to not dare ask him to stay, not to hold him back. 

She couldn’t breathe. 

She pushed against the wall, turning the corner again, searching for a black car in a sea of what looked like identical cars, searching for a mop of dark curls behind a wheel, running between the cars, her bags forgotten on the pavement. Her last resolve snapped in her face like an elastic band she kept pulling like it couldn’t go any further without cracking in her life like thunder; she had to ask. 

She searched for his car until she could spot it at the end of a long line of cars, her heels hitting the ground faster, almost running toward him, not blinking, fearing he could disappear, fearing she could lose him. 

She saw him jump when she knocked on his window looking like a mess, her hair flying all over the place, with red eyes and red lipstick spilling out of the lines of her lips, print on the back of her hand with teeth marks and water stains. 

He got out of the car fastly, one of his arms still stuck in the seatbelt, battling with it until he could get free of it, taking her face in his hand, burning her skin, making a fresh sob ripped her inside to crash on his face, to make him search her body for any injury, for any possible wound on the outside of her body, other than the blood pouring down in her belly from those thousands cuts, drowning her. 

She shook her head in his hands a thousand times, one shake for each of her cuts. “Would you have stayed?” she asked, her voice trembling between every word, lacing them with pain and urgency. 

“Dany?” he asked, not understanding, following the shake of her head with his eyes, tracking her movements. 

“Would you have stayed?” she repeated like those same words could suddenly be clearer like they could become something he would understand. She sounded desperate, her fingers gripping the hand on either side of her face. “If I had asked you back then, if I’d let you, would you have stayed?” she asked, her eyes travelling from one deep grey pool to the other. 

“Yes.” 

It was simple, a stripped word tearing her apart, dripping with sincerity, confirming she should have asked, confirming she might not be trying to save pieces of herself from drowning if she had just asked. 

“I should have asked,” she whispered brokenly, looking down, her eye catching the muscle jumping on his jaw, his lips twitching like he was trying to keep words from flying down on her, “I’m sorry I never asked.” They ignored the honking of the car around them. She looked back at his eyes, pleading with him, “I’m asking you now.” 

She was asking him to stay. She was going back on her porch in Dragonstone on a windy, rainy day, asking him to stay. 

“You’re the one leaving Dany,” he reminded her, pain in his voice, pushing her hair back, out of her face, sliding one of his hands and cupping the back of her head. 

“No.” She sounded desperate, pushing herself on the tip of her toe to look into his eyes behind a curtain of tears, gripping his forearms like the lifeline they were. “I was never supposed to be the one leaving,” she told him brokenly, “I was supposed to be the one left behind.” 

He was supposed to have left her behind. 

She was supposed to protect herself with the certitude she wasn’t to blame, she wasn’t the one leaving, she was the one left with pain, the one that wasn’t supposed to really have a choice in the matter. 

She was supposed to be the one not holding him back. 

“Dany,” he pleaded, dragging her name until he had no air, anchoring his thumb on her cheekbone. 

She pulled herself to him, pulling him to her with the force of despair, crashing her lips on him in a resonating clash of teeth, letting a new sob go die on his tongue. 

“I am asking you to stay … to find your way back to me,” she whispered against his lips, her eyes closed tightly, not willing to look back at him yet, “back to that moment of us in Dragonstone where I should have asked. I am asking you to believe that every part of me wants to stay right now as much as you did then.” 

She couldn’t stop the words now. They were cascading out of her like a prayer that had been mute for too long, that wanted to be heard. With long fingers closing more tightly around the hair at the back of her head, she got pulled closer to him, his lips finding hers, searching answers or giving them, she wasn’t sure. 

“I am asking you,” she implored again, flushed against his lips, with no space between them, with a cacophony of car honks around them.

“Okay.” 

It was a simple word … meaning nothing if it wasn’t Jon, if it wasn’t for his lips sucking on her bottom lips, for his hands bringing her to him like he needed to touch every inch of her, for his tongue seeking access to her mouth, for the lazy kiss that brought white spot in her vision. 

_Every move he ever made was charged with a promise…_

_To her._

She took a step back, looking back at him with tears still tracking down her face, uncontrollable, like a dam broke in her, letting out waves of it, tsunamis of pleading. He tried erasing them with the tips of his fingers, swiping them away with a move of his thumb. 

Around them, the cars were starting to be impatient, honking, trying to get around them. She put her forefinger up too, impatient. She needed another minute. 

“You said I felt like home,” she said with a wet smile, raining small kisses against his lips before stepping back until she couldn’t feel the warmth of his skin against hers. She offered him the saddest smile she owned, “You felt like love to me.”

Something changed in his face, in his eyes, pleading for more time the same way she pleaded for him to stay, to come back to her somehow. They wanted time they didn’t have, in the middle of the road, surrounded by people in a hurry to leave when the only thing they wanted was for one of them to stay. 

She repeated the words with her eyes, stretching the last bit of time they had. 

He felt a little bit like love to her. 

_He was the one with all the cards now,_ with her heart and the impossible thing she was asking of him, with the knowledge she would end up with more than a broken heart, with no strand to hold on to at all, with nothing and just a black void in the shape of him with the echo of her sobs and her voice asking him to stay that morning instead of her silence. She was asking him to choose a four-day-old relationship over everything, knowing she would choose it too. She was asking him if she could hold him back, if there was any possibility that being held back was something he would actually choose, if there were a possibility _she_ could be his _something more._

She was choosing him. 

With her heart stuck in her throat, she smiled at him one last time before turning back to an abandoned bag on the pavement, refusing to watch him leave again. She didn’t want to see his silhouette go back in the car the same way she wanted to forget the rain beating up back while he was leaving Dragonstone. 

___

**Then**

Daenerys closed her eyes when she heard the soft click of her door close behind her, not remembering the last time she closed her office door. 

_She couldn’t._

She looked down at the brown envelope in her hand, at the crumpled corner of it she wouldn’t leave alone. She kept rolling it between her fingers, wondering if she should open it, if she had it in her to do it, if she had it in her to use the information in it and ask for more. 

She threw her hair on a messy bun on top of her head, the loose curls bringing sweat beads pearling on the nape of her neck. It had nothing to do with the illegally acquired documents on her hands, with all the possibly it brings, all the cowardice she could use on herself. 

She sat down, the corner of the envelope rolling between her fingers, her mind elsewhere, in Dragonstone, in the Cliffside house, in the rain of a windy morning, in her empty hand around the cold door knob, incapable of letting it go even after she couldn’t even feel the cold metal biting in her skin. 

The envelope was as heavy as the air that morning, as the lump of fear in her throat kept her from asking him to stay, as all the rational bones in her body that kept her from running after him. 

She jumped when her door opened, trying to hide the envelope with trembling hands under her desk, sighing with relief when she saw who it was. 

“You have it?” Missandei asked, vibrating with excitement when she saw the envelope, taking it in her hand, looking at her with surprise when she saw it was intact, apart from the destroyed corners, “You didn’t open it?” 

“Should I?” she asked uncertainly, feeling like it was her own Pandora box, like this was the unknown. She tried to list things she knew about him, to calm the frantic beating of her heart. She knew he was impossible to forget, she knew his life was in the North, in the Night’s Watch with its nearest location approximately 3476 km from her, she knew his scent, his taste, the texture of his skin. She knew his hands. She knew he made her smile, laugh, moan like nobody before him. 

She knew she let him go. 

She knew she was missing a stranger. 

“Don’t you want to know?” Missy asked her, her long fingers pushing the envelope back to her, frowning when Daenerys didn’t move to take it back, just looked at it on top of her desk, “You can’t stop talking about him, Dany.” 

She knew she couldn’t stop talking about him, explaining to Missy and Sansa every second of them she remembered, trying to keep those minutes alive in her mind, as fresh as her morning’s memory. She felt like she was 14 again, holding hands and exchanging stares with a boy she convinced herself could be so much more. 

“I know,” she said, taking the envelope in her hand again, finding the corners, “you should have seen Tyrion’s face when he handed me the envelope, Missy.” 

Her Chief of Staff had looked at her like she asked him to erase evidence of a murder, like she had planned to commit voter fraud, like she was killing any of his political aspiration by _finally_ making the misstep he was waiting for. 

“Let me guess,” Missy started, rolling her eyes, “he looked at you like you were suddenly a hysterical woman, a ticking bomb, only days away from giving all _his_ hope for a boy.” 

Dany laughed, bringing her hand on her mouth, imagining Tyrion with his nose already in a glass of wine, trying to forget he put all his hopes in a woman with much scarier emotions than any men. “It was exactly like that,” she said, a smile tugging at her lips. 

“Tyrion is a hypocrite,” Missy said, “he’s good at his job, but your image is _my_ job, and your heart is _yours._ He can try and control his own first, he’s lucky he’s still here.” 

Missandei’s words were like sharp blades lace with poison. She didn’t forgive Tyrion for what he did months prior, trying to save his sister’s ass without thinking of what it could do to Daenerys and everyone in this office. She had labelled him an _egotistical maniac_ , ready to do anything to stay on top, arguing with him that it wasn’t how they did things here, in _Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen_ office. 

“It’s still an enormous invasion of privacy, Missy,” she said, fidgeting with the corners of the envelope. They didn’t know what information it could contain, what kind of information she could never learn from him. “Maybe I’d like to learn all of this from him,” she admitted. 

“Just look at his contact information,” Missy said, knowing it was the only reason Dany asked for the damn document in the first place. 

She wanted the possibility to hear his voice, to see his smile, to ask him everything she kept for herself that dreadful day, to more she had a hard time to give.

She pushed the envelope toward Missy, silently asking her to open it, to filter the information for her and give her the only thing she wanted. She heard the ripping sound of a letter opener slicing through papers, studying Missandei’s expression until she pushed a paper in front of her, smirking, “I would have let him fuck me silly against a window too.” 

Daenerys snorted, the sound dying on her lips when she looked down at the photography in front of her. Jon Snow was looking back at her with a seriousness she never experienced coming from him, his gaze piercing the glossy paper, the ink not giving justice to the grey of his eyes, not showing those tiny specs of white in them. 

She sighed softly, tracing his face with her finger, pushing away invisible dust from the paper, ignoring the laugh of Missy, making her feel like a fourteen-year-old again. 

_Commander Jon Snow, stationed at Always Winter._

Stationed at Always Winter. she needed to add even more distance in her approximation; Jon Snow was as far from her as he could possibly be. 

“I put his contact on your phone,” Missy said, sliding her phone beside the picture, “will you call him?” 

She wasn’t sure. 

“I don’t know,” she murmured, her eyes still on him, on the single curls falling on his face, on the annoyed look on his face. 

She didn’t know. Having his information didn’t make it feel less of a tragic love story, didn’t make her less of a workaholic or less of a disappointment. Calling him would give him power and she didn’t know him enough to know how he would choose to yield that power, if he would use it against her. 

Jon Snow had the power of breaking her heart. She had the power of disappointing him. 

“I wish Sansa was here,” Missy said in a heavy sigh, “she would be on my side.” 

Dany smiled at her friend, shaking her head. Sansa wouldn’t. “Sansa is not fond of illegal activities like using federal databases to find that guy I can’t keep out of my mind,” Daenerys answered cheekily, knowing Sansa would prefer to be kept out of all of this. 

“She is missing the simple joys of life,” Missy deadpanned, making her laugh. 

“She is,” Dany said, looking at the picture in her hand, knowing she should have asked him to stay, she should have asked for more than the 1440 minutes she took, more than the heartache she had to control every day since she saw him disappear behind a curtain of rain … like he never existed. 

The only thing she had of him was a stolen hair tie. 

She took the envelope and the picture and with a mourning breath, she put Jon Snow to rest in her files cabinet, locking it. She combated the way she wanted him to stay, the way she almost held him back to her. She could combat the way he was calling her name now, the way her fingers were burning for more. 

The only thing she couldn’t fight was the lump in her throat in the shape of him, the heart sinking in the bottom of her stomach every time she thought of him. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Valyrian Translation :  
> Udrāzmio! iksan sīr vaoreznuni -- Commander! I am so sorry  
> Udrāzmio -- Commander  
> Kesan mazverdagon ziry bē naejot ao, Udrāzmio -- I will make it up to you, Commander  
> qogralbar -- fuck  
> Kostilus, Udrāzmio -- please, Commander  
> Nyke jorrāelagon naejot māzigon sir -- I need to come now


End file.
